Solutions Architect in Northampton

The Technical Lead & Solution Architect role is responsible for leading the technical direction, engineering quality, and day-to-day delivery of digital products and internal systems. The role provides hands-on technical leadership to squads while also owning the solution architecture that ensures products and platforms remain scalable, secure, and future-ready. They will guide technical design, set engineering standards, and ensure solutions are built in line with architectural principles. They also define the architectural foundations, roadmaps, and integration patterns that support long-term business and technology goals, aligning the UK landscape with global enterprise architecture.

The key tasks for the role are as follows:

• Act as Technical Lead for digital products & platform: Own end-to-end solution architecture of all digital products.
• IT lead at a day-to-day level, ensuring consistent oversight across squads while still having the capacity to plan forward-looking architectural themes.
• Evolving our technology landscape to support the long-term business and product strategy.
• Ensure product architectures are secure, scalable, and maintainable.
• Provide hands-on technical guidance to development teams during design and delivery.
• Collaborate with Product Owners, Product Managers and Digital Asset Owners to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
• Collaborate where necessary, to translate technical requirements into digestible Jira tickets to deliver Features and User Stories for development.
• Identify technical risks and provide mitigation strategies for product initiatives.

Documentation and Ownership of Architecture Artifacts:

• Maintain the Architecture Repository: Document and manage the country's IT landscape, including applications, integrations, infrastructure, and data flows, in an up-to-date architecture repository and system inventory.
• Define and Manage Local Architecture:

• As-Is Architecture: Capture the current state of the country's systems and dependencies. Maintain and own the architecture repository, system inventory, and integration blueprint for the country.
• Transition Architecture: Co-develop detailed roadmaps for moving from the legacy systems to global platform/solutions, with a focus on country-specific priorities and dependencies, in close collaboration with the Regional Architect and Global Enterprise Architect, among other stakeholders.
• Target Architecture: Co-define the target architecture aligning with the regional architect and Global Enterprise Architect and other relevant stakeholders while ensuring the target architecture accommodates local business needs.

Solution Design and Day-to-Day Architecture:

• Oversee and support day-to-day solution architecture efforts, including design, review, and alignment activities, ensuring country-specific requirements are met while adhering to global Enterprise Architecture standards.
• Serve as the local subject matter expert for architecture, guiding solution development, and ensuring technical integrity.
• Provide mentorship and support to the local IT team for architecture-related tasks and projects.

Governance and Standards Adherence:

• Chair the Country Architecture committee to ensure alignment with Enterprise Architecture standards & guidelines, review architectural decisions, and address local needs in line with global EA strategies.
• Represent the country in the Regional Architecture Committee and relevant global architecture forums aligning local architecture with regional and global strategies while advocating for country-specific challenges, priorities, and requirements.
• Enforce global enterprise architecture principles, tools, and governance within the country's IT landscape.
• Conduct regular compliance checks and ensure that local IT solutions adhere to global architecture standards and strategic objectives.

Convergence Program (When Applicable):

• Act as the local architecture lead and subject matter expert (SME) for the UK, leading the architectural effort to decommission local legacy systems and transition to global platform components and applications.
• Manage local-to-local, local-to-global, and support global-to-global integration architecture efforts in collaboration with country IT teams, regional and global stakeholders.
• Ensure that local transition & target architecture complies with the global roadmap and timelines.

Collaboration and Stakeholder Engagement:

• Work closely with the Country CIO and business units to balance global priorities with local business requirements.
• Provide detailed inputs to the Regional Architect, supporting the high-level enterprise architecture vision and ensuring alignment with country-specific realities.
• Act as the primary bridge between country IT teams and global/regional architecture teams, facilitating smooth collaboration.

IT Modernisation and Innovation:

• Actively identify opportunities for innovation, modernisation, and optimisation in the local IT landscape to enhance efficiency, scalability, in alignment with the long-term global architecture vision.
• Lead the adoption of global platform components and solutions, ensuring seamless and effective local implementation.
• Design, document and deliver scalable, secure and cost-effective end-to-end technical architectures that meet product, business and functional requirements.
• Align Technology with Business Strategy, ensuring all solutions support enterprise objectives, technology roadmaps, architectural standards and Product Roadmaps.
• Provide Technical Leadership, guide and mentor delivery teams through design, development and implementation to ensure quality and consistency of end-to-end solutions.
• Drive integration and innovation by identifying opportunities to optimise existing systems, product platforms, and introduce new technologies that enhance business performance, end user experience and manage decommissioning of technical debt.
• Ensure Governance and Compliance by maintaining holistic architectural integrity through design reviews, adherence to security standards, and alignment with organisation policies.

Personal Specification:

• Ideally a degree in Computer Science or related fields or equivalent 7 years of experience as a Solution / IT Architecture within services, consulting, or product companies' desirable.
• Thrives in a varied role, flexible and able to balance the needs of product technical lead role, internal systems architecture and wider group technology with ease and professionalism.
• Enjoys working across multiple domains, switching confidently between product roadmap work, integration planning, internal IT improvements and vendor engagements.
• Motivated by self-development and self-learning, maintaining up-to-date knowledge of emerging security trends and threats, applying this insight to strengthen architectural designs.
• Comfortable owning technical decisions end-to-end, whilst remaining open to input and adjusting approach based on ideas and evolving organisation.
• Experienced at creating detailed high-quality documents with relevant content (Application Architecture views, Data flow diagrams, integration diagrams, technology reference models etc).
• Strong collaborator who builds effective working relationships with internal teams, stakeholders across the organisation and vendors.
• Willingness to get stuck in and provide hands-on support to technical teams to collaborate in diagnosing and resolving design and platform issues.
• Well versed with architecture modelling languages and a proven track record on solution architecture in cloud environment. Good knowledge of AZURE solutions.
• Good overall cloud Architecture knowledge: IaaS / PaaS / SaaS, new cloud services, Continuous Integration & Continuous development, monitoring/alerting, FinOps.
• Experience in working with enterprise products. Should have the ability to comprehend complex technical products and solutions.
• Knowledge of security best practices and compliance requirements, with experience implementing security controls and measures within solution architecture designs.
• Experience in payments, Benefits & Rewards Industry, a big advantage.
• Excellent presentation skills, documentation skills and stakeholder management.
• Ability to work in a multi-country environment.
• English fluent, French is a plus.

To get this challenge: Video call discussion with TA Partner. Video call or face to face discussion with Head of Digital Solutions. Video call or face to face discussion with Head of Digital Solutions & Panel. Video call or face to face discussion with HRBP.

Your team: IT Team

Your location: Milton Keynes, UK

Happy at work:

• A meaningful job: Be the change! Help us build the future of employee benefits by bringing to life sustainable and personalized experiences and contribute to making a real impact on millions of lives. Our business model delivers not just for individuals but their communities too, by supporting local businesses and economies.
• A great culture: People matter - a lot! Be part of a multicultural team that moves as one in a fast-paced and innovative environment. We respect and care authentically about our people, we embrace wellbeing and work-life balance, new ideas and we have a lot of fun!
• An empowering environment: Be yourself! At Pluxee we proudly embrace diversity and value the uniqueness of our talents, fostering an inclusive workplace where all abilities are celebrated, and equal learning and growing opportunities are a given.