Solution Architect

We’re the UK’s largest mutual life, pensions and investment company, offering protection, long-term savings and asset management products and services.

At Royal London Group our Solutions Architects play a pivotal role in evolving our technology landscape. Your primary objective is to enable our organisation to safely exploit the potential of technology capabilities to serve our society better. Your contribution directly impacts the value to our customers and members, and business growth across Domains / Business Value Streams of Protection, Equity Release, Long-term Savings/Pensions, Long Standing Customers, Annuities.

Our Solutions Architects regularly work with Senior Solutions Architects, Business Analysts, operational colleagues, to develop technology products and solutions for our core propositions. You will have the opportunity to bring your experience in modern architectural practices to innovate, refresh our estate and experiment across a complex range of organisational capabilities within a bounded context. Our projects incrementally develop enduring products and provide a range of exciting challenges including cloud computing, AI, consolidation, migration, integrations, simplification, and Digital Experiences. Solutions typically involve changes to, or creation of, business processes, operating model, application, data flows, infrastructure, and integration of third-party services.

You have a solid grasp of the concepts of business goals, objectives and business outcomes, business capabilities, value-streams and business processes and their importance in solution architecture. We are committed to your growth and offer continuous learning opportunities, mentorship, and a clear path for professional development. You will join a supportive and inclusive team that values collaboration, trust, empowerment, and achieving together.

About The Role

Reports into the Principal Architect (Lead Domain Architect) and aligned to the Digital Services Platform to deliver innovative solutions that meet strategic business outcomes. Fast-paced project environment, working within an enduring squad in the regulated industry, preferably within Insurance, Life Assurance. Developing own and team capabilities is integral to all Architect roles at Royal London Group. Enjoys and willing to contribute to the success of other architects. Comfortable exploring the application of emerging technology trends to traditional problems. Utilises architecture modelling language such as ArchiMate, C4; EA tooling like Ardoq, BizzDesign, LeanIX, Orbus Infinity; exposure to Architecture frameworks such as TOGAF, Zachman and executable solution patterns. Visio designers need to be keen to adapt and learn!

Collaborate with business analysts to understand and action against business requirements. Manage architecture design through the Governance process including presentation of solutions to design forums and wider stakeholder meetings. Collaborate with other architecture disciplines to ensure designs consider all aspects of architecture. Support the engineering teams with design implementation. Keep the enterprise architecture tooling up to date as new technologies and designs are implemented and created.

Responsibilities Across Three Key Dimensions

• Interpret Business Needs: Utilises decision trees and architecture patterns to translate business, non-functional and technical requirements into an execution-ready architectural design. Works closely with business analysts and engineers to provide customer-centric, data-driven, traceable architecture designs for components that are traceable to transition state and change requirements. Understands business and technical capabilities (future and current state), and how solutions support their development.
• Assess Technology: Monitors the current-state solution portfolio serviceability. Supports senior architects and product managers in end-of-life product decisions to maintain, refresh or retire services or systems, including applications, technologies, processes and information. Analyses the business-IT environment to detect opportunities for ever-greening the legacy and technical debt and recommends options to make strategic improvements. Consults with technical architecture peers to ensure all layers of architecture are evaluated and solutions constructed robustly including Security, Infrastructure, Networks.
• Apply Technology: Supports evaluation, design and analysis across a group of technologies based on enterprise business strategy, business capabilities, value-streams, business requirements and enterprise standards. Manage and design executable architecture for a single project or product or initiative with awareness of the need to stitch into other designs to develop enterprise capability. Works closely with the Product and Project Management offices to ensure the execution of plans corresponds with what is being promised on the designs.

Five Core Competencies

• Interpersonal Excellence: Articulating concepts through compelling and relatable narratives to effectively educate, engage, influence and collaborate with stakeholders and peers to achieve architecture goals.
• Business and Technology Strategy: Identifying and seizing opportunities to align technology, processes and business plans with strategic goals, guiding effective and feasible choices, building flexibility and resilience across all vectors of our business.
• Critical Thinking: Constructively challenging as a counsel and coach to guide legacy assumptions and commonly held beliefs to adopt alternative modern methods to achieve enduring results. Solving problems, navigating complex situations and adapting to new information to drive business success.
• Digital Enablement: Applying design-thinking methods to ensure end-user needs and perspectives are addressed, identifying iterative solution development approaches, collaborating with platforms and other technical domains to manage interdependencies in achieving target states, and promoting best practices in a modern delivery environment.
• Architecture Foundations: Design the transition state architecture for the domain / Business Value Stream / Platform with ownership of non-functional requirements. Design and build solutions and roadmaps to transition the business towards the future state, underpinned by robust architectural frameworks for the organisation.

Skills

You have been developing your core competencies and bring technical breadth to provide credible designs, analysis and design tasks related to support the development of technology solutions. You are a hands-on architect, from an engineering background, who can consider multiple viewpoints, provide weighted solution options, experience of industry design patterns for modern architectures, clarity on breaking down packets of work and transition states to design solutions incrementally to meet business needs and align with target/transition states, and architectural governance and standards.

Hands-on experience in modelling languages such as C4 and ArchiMate. Robust understanding of modern architecture methods and patterns. Composable Architecture based on MACH principles (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless), Event Driven. Skills to modernise architectural estates and drive serviceability, observability dashboarding and metrics in end products. Experience of Digital Transformation within either Java or Microsoft technologies landscape, Azure platform and .Net ecosystem. Expertise in Mobile and Web development frameworks and optimisation technologies including serverless and edge computing. Knowledge of system development life cycle methodologies such as Agile, Incremental, DevOps, capable of engaging with engineers. Understanding of Domain Driven Design principles, controls, EA patterns, application libraries. Experience in selection and consuming Integration Patterns and other tech stacks such as Microsoft Dynamics to deliver Digital capabilities across customers and colleagues. Proven analytical, influencing / consensus building, technical and communication skills.

Engineering Background In One Or More Of The Following

• Modern CI/CD pipelines with container orchestration and deployment technologies
• Development frameworks like Spring Boot, Micronaut, ASP .NET Core
• Microsoft technologies, Azure platform and .Net ecosystem
• Development languages like .Net, Java, Python
• Database technologies and platforms like SQL, NoSQL, Data Lake, Snowflake, Databricks, MongoDB, Oracle
• Frontend web development languages like React, Angular, JavaScript, HTML and CSS
• Observability platforms like Splunk, Dynatrace, Datadog, Grafana
• Integration technologies like REST, Kafka, iPaaS, API Management, ESB
• Awareness of placement of workloads on On-Prem Servers and Cloud (Azure / AWS / GCP / Hybrid / Private).
• Data savvy with awareness of technology architecture elements like Integration, Cloud Network and Security.
• Good understanding of information principles, guardrails and processes spanning data within operational contexts such as Policy Administration Systems.
• Knowledge of system development life cycle methodologies such as Agile, Incremental, DevOps, capable of engaging with engineers.