Solutions Architect in London

As the Solution Architect, you will be a core part of the Architecture team for the CIO of Mortgages & Financial Wellbeing (M&FW). You will be accountable for the definition and delivery of the Architecture that supports our Mortgage portfolio.

You will feed into the definition of technology roadmaps that support our business ambitions and align to our overarching technology strategy. You will define and provide assurance of end-to-end solution architectures for change, assuring both the quality and completeness of our solutions. This role will input into a culture of continuous improvement, with a focus on building architecture capability.

Across M&FW, we have an important journey ahead of us to build and maintain our position in the mortgage market and respond to changing customer needs, guided by the strategic pillars of Simply Brilliant Service and Focused, Fit and Fast. This is a pivotal role within the M&FW CIO portfolio team, who rely on this role for support in strategic thinking to drive forward the delivery agenda.

This role sits within the M&FW (Mortgages and Financial Wellbeing) function Architecture team, which provides services to the Mortgages business, covering both the owner-occupied and buy-to-let sectors. Given Nationwide’s position as one of the leading mortgage providers in the UK, the Mortgages business is a cornerstone of the society. And with a focus on investment and growth, it is an exciting place to be.

More broadly, the M&FW function operates under the MTD (Member Technology Division) function, which is responsible for building and maintaining Nationwide’s brand and reputation both internally and externally.

At Nationwide, we offer hybrid working wherever possible. More rewarding relationships are supported through our hybrid approach, bringing colleagues together across our UK wide estate, whilst also supporting generous access to home working. We value our time in the office to solve problems, to learn, and to feel connected.

For this job, you will spend at least two days per week, or if part-time you will spend 40% of your working time, based at either our Nationwide house - Swindon office or our London office. Whilst these locations are where we are primarily looking to fill the role, if you are an internal applicant based in a different location, we would welcome your application and if successful, your hiring manager will provide further details on how this could work for this specific role.

You will be architecting and designing technical solutions and platforms and providing technical direction and guidance to engineers across multiple teams. Harnessing your experience of modern engineering techniques, technology, and tooling to define resilient and highly scalable solutions.

You will be helping ensure our solutions align to strategic direction and technology choices and are appropriate to meet the long-term goals of the business strategy, as well as lower-level requirements. You will need to ensure that the solutions meet guardrails and NFRs, as well as aligning to best practice architectures and patterns.

A team player who can lead by example, you will also nurture and develop contacts and relationships to enable things to be done faster and more efficiently. It is about getting stuck in and having a go, knowing that sometimes to fail fast is to learn fast.

We are looking for someone with experience of the following:

• Architecting/designing and implementing fit for purpose solutions using both on-premises and Cloud platforms.
• Designing and developing full stack solutions, with a strong understanding of good development practice on each tier of the stack.
• A willingness to get hands-on for POCs or prototypes where appropriate.
• Standard technology governance processes, including evidencing conformance to guardrails.
• Quality checking and ensuring alignment of lower-level artefacts and solutions.
• Defining and comparing options, architectures, principles, and patterns when designing solutions, and articulating their relative advantages and disadvantages.
• Designing and developing solutions that integrate with and re-use existing services and platforms, in a secure and reliable way.
• Working with stakeholders/peers to understand the requirements and how the technical artefacts interlock with activities within and outside of the team, and where required negotiating solutions to align with principles and architectural strategy.
• Defining appropriate data models for relational and no-SQL databases, and associated MI and data flows.
• Designing Rest APIs.
• A range of tools and techniques to effectively convey a solution at a range of diverse levels, and to different audiences.
• DevOps practices and principles.

Our Customer First behaviours are all about putting customers and members at the heart of how we work together. You can strengthen your application by showing the behaviours that resonate with you, and how you might have already demonstrated these.

• Say it straight - This is about being honest and direct with good intent and saying what needs to be said in the room. It’s also about being clear, precise, and using language that we and, importantly, our customers and members can understand.
• Push for better - This is about aiming high and constantly looking for better in how we work together and serve our customers and members.
• Get it done - This is about prioritising what will have the greatest impact, being decisive and taking accountability for delivering on the end-to-end outcome.

There are all sorts of employee benefits available at Nationwide, including:

• A personal pension – if you put in 7% of your salary, we’ll top up by a further 16%
• Up to 2 days of paid volunteering a year
• Life assurance worth 8x your salary
• A great selection of additional benefits through our salary sacrifice scheme
• Wellhub – Access to a range of free and paid options for health and wellness.
• Access to an annual performance related bonus
• Access to training to help you develop and progress your career

Nationwide is the world’s largest building society. With over 15 million customers, we have a relationship with almost a quarter of the UK’s population. We’ve got the scale to compete with the big banks, but we’re not a