Responsibilities
- The Application Architect plays a key technical role within the Risk Intelligence Engineering organisation, contributing to the architecture and technical direction of applications and services within the World‑Check One platform
- This role focuses on application‑level architecture, design quality, and technical guidance, working closely with Solution Architects, Product Owners, and engineering teams
- You will help translate business and non‑functional requirements into robust, scalable designs while ensuring alignment with architectural standards and long‑term platform strategy
- The environment is cloud‑native and distributed, supporting high‑volume, low‑latency workloads with strong security, reliability, and governance requirements
- Contribute to and shape application architectures aligned with enterprise and solution‑level standards
- Translate functional and non‑functional requirements into clear, pragmatic architectural designs
- Promote architectural consistency, reuse, and good design practices across application components
- Apply and promote architectural principles, security standards, and engineering best practices
- Review significant technical design decisions within the application scope, working collaboratively with engineering and solution architecture teams
- Ensure solutions meet required quality attributes including performance, resilience, scalability, and maintainability
- Act as a recognised technical point of reference for development teams working on World‑Check One applications
- Collaborate closely with Solution Architects, Product Owners, and Business Analysts to evaluate design options and trade‑offs
- Influence technical decisions through expertise and clear communication rather than formal authority
- Guide the design of cloud‑native, AWS‑hosted applications, considering resilience, security, operability, and cost
- Advise on appropriate use of REST APIs, messaging, data stores, caching, and integration patterns
- Ensure operational concerns such as observability, supportability, and deployment are considered early in design
- Contribute to architectural roadmaps and the ongoing evolution of the World‑Check One platform
- Validate architectural approaches where appropriate through lightweight proofs of concept
- Support continuous improvement in architectural practices, patterns, and technical standards
Qualifications
Sound understanding of security, authentication, and authorisation concepts. Solid experience with Java and Spring Boot in production environments. Working knowledge of containerised architectures, messaging patterns, and distributed data stores. Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts clearly to both technical and non‑technical audiences. Ability to influence technical decisions and collaborate effectively across teams. Strong understanding of backend application design, API design, and data modelling. Experience working in an application architecture or senior engineering role within distributed systems. Practical experience designing and operating AWS‑based applications in a cloud‑native environment. Understanding of Infrastructure as Code concepts and modern CI/CD practices. Curious, proactive, and committed to building high‑quality, sustainable systems. Familiarity with modern front‑end architectures and integration patterns. Experience optimising performance, resilience, and cost in production cloud environments. Confident operating in complex environments with competing priorities. Understanding of performance, scalability, and resilience engineering. Pragmatic architectural thinker with strong engineering fundamentals. Collaborative and influential, able to guide teams through technical expertise. Experience working in financial services, risk, compliance, or other regulated environments. Deeper exposure to event‑driven architectures and asynchronous messaging at scale. Comfortable working across technical and business stakeholders. Hands‑on experience building or evolving CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure using IaC tools. Awareness of observability practices such as metrics, logging, and distributed tracing. Career Stage: Senior Associate
