Software Architect in London

BigHand offers technology solutions for busy legal professionals that provide data and insights to increase value and profits. Through our expert knowledge and innovative technology, we enable our customers to achieve enhanced efficiency, better decision-making and harness their competitive edge. We build with tomorrow in mind, transforming ideas into action and empowering our customers to succeed in a world of constant change.

We are a business driven by our values and have these at the centre of everything we do. Our BigHanders are dedicated to building a culture where We Win Together, We Love to Learn, We Do the Right Thing, We Own It and We Find the Fun.

About The Role

BigHand has been iteratively building its cloud-native SaaS capabilities in the last few years, and continues to raise the bar — maturing our microservices-based, event-driven architecture, expanding AI across our product portfolio, and building a richer set of shared cross-product platform capabilities that let our product engineering teams move faster and deliver more value. AI is not a future ambition at BigHand — it is already shaping our products and our roadmap is accelerating. Our goal is for every product to be AI-powered, and over the next 12–18 months every product engineering team will be building or integrating AI capabilities. The person joining this role will have a genuine opportunity to shape how we architect and deliver those frontier capabilities at scale.

Reporting to the Director of Architecture, you will take ownership of the architecture for one of our products, contribute to our cross-product platform, and own the standards and guardrails that give our product engineering teams the confidence to move fast without compromising on quality or customer outcomes. You will work closely with product teams, product engineering teams, the Architecture team, and our cloud engineering team to deliver architecture that is ambitious in vision and practical in delivery.

What You'll Do

• Define, evolve and deliver the architectural roadmap for your product area.
• Own API contracts, service boundaries, data models and inter-service communication patterns within your product.
• Use your technical depth to solve the hardest problems from product engineering team.
• Design and guide the build of shared, reusable platform capabilities to reduce duplication and increase engineering leverage across products.
• Champion our architectural principles: Open Modular Architecture, Data-centric Mindset, Event-Driven & Connected, Security & Privacy by Design.
• Take new technologies from evaluation to adoption, and empower teams to use them confidently and consistently.
• Define our architectural governance model for agentic SDLC from the ground up, encoding standards and principles as machine-readable context that agents consume at the start of development, so architectural alignment is built in rather than bolted on.
• Build the policy-as-code guardrails that agents cannot circumvent, to guarantee that AI-generated software aligned with our principles, quality standards and customer outcomes.
• Maintain BigHand's architectural standards as a clear, shared reference for how we build software.

What we're looking for

Before you read through the skills below, we aren't expecting someone to tick every box. If the role excites you and you can bring most of this, we'd encourage you to apply.

• Strong experience designing microservices and distributed systems — APIs, service boundaries, data models, and deployment patterns.
• Experience building in cloud providers (Azure/AWS/GCP) — container orchestration (Kubernetes/AKS), managed databases, messaging, and networking.
• Experience building event-driven architectures — message brokers, event streaming, async patterns and their trade-offs.
• Experience designing systems where data privacy and auditability are first-class architectural concerns.
• Strong communication and design skills — able to translate business needs into technical architectures and explain complex trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience with .NET Core / C# or Java backend codebases — web APIs, data access patterns, and service composition.
• Experience integrating AI/ML capabilities into product architectures — LLMs, Azure AI services, or similar.
• Familiarity with any of: Domain-Driven Design, NoSQL databases (e.g. CosmosDB), stream processing, or CQRS/event sourcing patterns.
• Experience encoding architectural standards as automated, enforceable constraints — policy-as-code tooling that makes compliance verifiable and hard to bypass.

What we offer

• 25 days holiday (exc. bank holidays) + 3 BigHand days off between Christmas & New Year.
• Various wellbeing benefits including private medical, vision, online wellbeing programs & webinars, access to online therapy and Employee Resource Groups (ERG).
• Company-wide Wellness day, for our teams all across the globe to switch off and spend the day doing something to nourish their mental health.
• Opportunities to give back with company volunteer events and individual volunteer days.
• Career growth opportunities and study leave allowance.
• Family benefits including enhanced parental leave, secondary caregiver leave and fertility support.
• Financial benefits including pension scheme, life assurance, and salary sacrificing.
• Cycle to Work Scheme and Tech Scheme.
• Growing business with a global presence, flexible working, modern offices, and remote work options.

Our DEI Commitment

We welcome the unique value and individuality that you can bring to BigHand. We are an equal opportunity employer and are dedicated to recruiting solely based on capability and potential regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, educational background, national origin, religion, military status or physical ability. Our BigHanders are dedicated to advancing our culture of belonging by embracing differing viewpoints, opinions, thoughts, and ideas.