Senior Solutions Architect (78909)

Salary: £110,000 - £120,000

Location: Manchester

Hours: Full time

Working Pattern: Hybrid working (40% in the office)

About this opportunity:

Are you ready to join our Transport Platform team and shape the next phase of our transformation? The Transport Platform sits within the wider Consumer Lending business and plays a vital role in helping Britain keep moving. We deliver customer‑focused solutions that make it easier to access vehicles, maintenance and related services, including seamless digital account management. We’re also committed to supporting the Group and the wider UK with its sustainability ambitions.

We’re transforming our core technology architecture—simplifying legacy systems, modernising our digital journeys, adopting microservices and cloud‑native engineering practices, and building a new data ecosystem. We’re also reshaping the technical capabilities of our people, embedding DevOps, Agile delivery and modern engineering at scale.

As a Lead Solutions Architect, you’ll own end‑to‑end architectural direction across multiple delivery teams. Partnering with Product Owners and Engineering Leads, you’ll ensure our solution designs are aligned to business strategy, technology strategy and our long‑term target architectures—while keeping service quality, resilience, sustainability and engineering excellence at the forefront.

Where you’ll make a difference:

• Leading architectural strategy for complex, multi‑team initiatives—designing, governing and integrating solutions that advance platform and Group objectives.
• Shape target state architectures across the lab, platform and wider enterprise.
• Collaborating with Product Owners, Customer Journey Managers and Engineering Leads to convert strategy into executable roadmaps, manage technical debt, establish clear non‑functional baselines, and create space for teams to mature towards the target architecture.
• Engineering solutions that are reliable, scalable, performant and secure, simplifying designs and standardising on endorsed technologies and patterns.
• Influence Architecture and Engineering communities to drive reuse, interoperability and prevent fragmentation.
• Adopting and maturing Group tooling, controls and architectural guardrails to unlock pace, quality and safety at scale.
• Ensure architectural decisions are consumable by engineering teams.
• Help codify patterns into automation and provide reference implementations.
• Shaping portfolio intent early, exploring options and trade‑offs, identifying dependencies and risks, and ensuring roadmaps remain value‑focused, feasible and resilient.
• Taking hands‑on ownership of emerging patterns and technologies, proving approaches through spikes, prototypes and reference architectures.
• Publish consumable guidance that accelerates adoption across teams and platforms.
• Act as a Chapter Lead where needed.
• Embedding architectural practices with Agility Leads to increase throughput, reduce total cost of ownership and sustain quality—driving a consistent architectural framework across the platform.
• Ensuring strong architectural custodianship, building solutions that align with operational excellence, regulatory controls, security requirements and cost.
• Support run/operate teams through clear interfaces, SLOs and shared ownership of reliability.
• Growing organisational capability, coaching architects and engineers in solution design, systems thinking and technology strategy.
• Contribute to hiring standards, talent attraction and succession planning.
• Investing in your own development, maintaining broad architectural expertise and deep domain knowledge while role modelling curiosity and continuous learning.

Why Lloyds Banking Group?

At Lloyds Banking Group, our purpose is clear—to help Britain prosper. Across the organisation, our colleagues are passionate about making a difference for customers, businesses and communities. Like the modern Britain we serve, we’re evolving. We're investing billions in our people, data and technology to transform how we support our 26 million customers. We’re growing with purpose—and we’ll invest in your personal and professional development so you can grow with us.

We are looking for people who have:

• Extensive experience leading the architecture of complex, multi‑team or multi‑system solutions that meet non‑functional, security, resilience and performance needs.
• Must have had experience with writing code but doesn’t necessarily need to be a current Engineer.
• Proven experience defining and maintaining architectural runway to inform product roadmaps and guide teams towards strategic technology direction.
• Strong familiarity with enterprise architecture standards, governed patterns and endorsed technologies, with the judgement to manage exceptions appropriately.
• Experience partnering with Product, Engineering and Enterprise Architecture to align stakeholders and navigate complex design decisions.
• Hands‑on experience de‑risking new patterns using spikes, prototypes and reference architectures, and helping teams adopt them effectively.
• Significant exposure to modern engineering and cloud‑native practices (microservices, CI/CD, DevOps, automation) to ensure operability and scale.
• Experience coaching architects and engineers through technology evaluation and solution design.
• The ability to anticipate and manage complex risk, compliance, non‑functional and operational requirements early in the design lifecycle.

About working for us:

We’re committed to being an inclusive organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity in all its forms. We want everyone to feel they belong and can be their best—regardless of background, identity or culture. We were one of the first major organisations to set representation goals for senior roles, launch a menopause health package, and introduce a dedicated Working with Cancer initiative. We particularly welcome applications from under‑represented groups. We’re also a Disability Confident employer—if you need reasonable adjustments during recruitment, just let us know.

What we can offer you:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%
• Annual performance‑related bonus
• Share schemes including free shares
• Benefits you can tailor to your lifestyle
• 30 days’ holiday plus bank holidays
• A range of wellbeing initiatives and family‑friendly policies

Ready for a career where you can design meaningful change, learn new skills and shape the future of financial services? Apply today and join our journey.

At Lloyds Banking Group, we're driven by a clear purpose—to help Britain prosper. Across the Group, our colleagues are focused on making a difference to customers, businesses and communities. With us you'll have a key role to play in shaping the financial services of the future, whilst the scale and reach of our Group means you'll have many opportunities to learn, grow and develop.

We keep your data safe. So, we'll only ever ask you to provide confidential or sensitive information once you have formally been invited along to an interview or accepted a verbal offer to join us which is when we run our background checks. We'll always explain what we need and why, with any request coming from a trusted Lloyds Banking Group person.

We're focused on creating a values‑led culture and are committed to building a workforce which reflects the diversity of the customers and communities we serve. Together we’re building a truly inclusive workplace where all of our colleagues have the opportunity to make a real difference.

Required skills: Automation, Coding, Risk Management, Solution Architecture, CI/CD, DevOps, Microservices, Agile delivery concepts.

Required languages: English.