Senior Solution Architect in Guildford

Location: Guildford Business Park, Guildford, Surrey GU2 8XG, United Kingdom

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 of the technology landscape 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

Education and Qualifications

• 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.