Senior Solution Architect in Guildford, Surrey

Location: Guildford Business Park Guildford Surrey GU2 8XG (1 day onsite)

Is it Permanent / Contract: FTE

Is it Onsite/Remote/Hybrid: Remote with occasional office visit (4 days remote & 1 day onsite in a week)

Responsibilities:

• Produce proposals and justify the value of technology strategies to senior business audiences.
• Drive alignment with the enterprise target picture, including system retirement.
• Ensure that architecture, divergences, and risks are clearly communicated and agreed by all stakeholders.
• Convey architecture decisions through a variety of communication techniques to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Lead architectural design authorities for projects, and work within enterprise architectural governance and enterprise portfolio management frameworks.
• Translate business requirements into technology, service, and security deliverables, identifying risks and proposing appropriate mitigations.
• Identify all areas of architectural, technical, and security risk, and ensure these are managed with the cooperation of appropriate stakeholders.
• Produce (or ensure production of) all architectural deliverables under the development methodology, including solution designs, architecture patterns, technical infrastructure designs and supporting documentation.
• Provide design assurance for solution architecture to ensure solutions are implemented as designed, to the correct standards and quality.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to other solution architects within the team.
• Self-manage day-to-day architecture priorities and delivery workload.

Skills and Experience:

• Strong interpersonal and stakeholder management skills, including the ability to interact at all business levels — from the CEO and C-suite through to technical SMEs, developers, testers, and project managers.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to assess the audience and pitch/influence appropriately.
• Working across enterprise technologies, including prior SME roles across infrastructure, cloud, and application domains.
• Defining, documenting, and architecting solutions across hybrid, on-premise, and public cloud estates, potentially requiring integration with legacy technologies for large projects and programmes.
• Supporting and designing mission-critical infrastructure solutions across a wide variety of technologies.
• IT security and risk management within an architecture role.
• Experience working within architectural design authorities and governance forums.
• Technical selection and RFI/RFP processes, including supplier assurance of third-party products and contractual due diligence including drafting statements of requirements for third parties or commenting on vendor statements of work (SoW).
• Working in a highly regulated environment (e.g. financial services).
• Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban) and waterfall methodologies along with associated toolsets (such as Jira).
• Use of documentation tools such as Atlassian Confluence along with diagramming or architectural modelling tools and languages (draw.io, Sparx, ADOIT, ArchiMate, Mermaid, C4).
• Broad knowledge of IT technologies and architectural styles and patterns (e.g. event-driven, serverless, microservices, SOA, layered architectures).
• Supporting implementation and solution design for large public cloud implementations, preferably both AWS and Azure.
• Supporting implementation and technical design across core technologies (Windows, Linux, VMware, Hyper-V, web, database, security gateways, LAN/WAN networking).
• Designing solutions involving middleware and integration including JBoss / WebLogic, enterprise service bus / message queueing / integration platforms (iPaaS) such as RabbitMQ, MuleSoft, Boomi, Kafka.
• Designing (including requirements traceability) secure, high performing, and highly available technology solutions.
• Knowledge of continuous integration and deployment processes, methods, and tools.
• Providing architectural support and assurance to DevOps teams, with application of agile practices.
• Ability to work with cutting-edge AI LLM technologies, producing work in conjunction with models such as Anthropic Claude, whilst experimenting and exploring different methods of co-working with AI.

Your education and qualifications should include:

• Degree or HND in information technology, or equivalent experience.
• Relevant technical and business qualifications (e.g. Microsoft or AWS certifications, TOGAF, ITIL).
• Evidence of your commitment to continuous learning.