Technical Lead/Solution Architect

Job Type: Contract

Work Mode: Hybrid (2 Days from office)

Act as the Technical Lead, responsible for:

• Solution Design

Produce and own end-to-end architecture for multiple portfolio initiatives. Collaborate with Product Owners, Architects and global development teams to define and describe high-level designs, align/review detailed designs and resolve any deviations. Ensure designs are aligned with the strategic target state vision, with the wider Global Risk Solutions & Liberty Mutual technology framework, standards and principles.

Understand the individual application projects and products to refine the existing detailed designs (based on the high-level design considerations and transition states) to a sufficient level of detail for translation into technical deliverables. Work closely with software architects, challenging their decisions and collaborating with them to optimise technical designs and translate them into technical deliverables.

Drive/document key architectural decisions for the projects and align key stakeholders to the proposed options. Document, present and gain approval for your high-level designs at the Architecture Review Board. Be able to define and assess non-functional requirements and participate in RFP processes to provision new software.

Define and document application security requirements as part of non-functional requirements, including authentication, access control, API security and threat modelling. Produce and assess threat models to identify and mitigate security risks within proposed solutions.

• Technology Capabilities & Standards

Provide application design and engineering expertise and guidance to IT professionals involved in the development and enhancement of business applications, as needed. Work with IT functional areas to identify, propose, assess and support the implementation of new technologies/off-the-shelf systems as solutions to business needs, based on strategic direction and priorities.

Create technical documentation for development solutions, future reference and reporting.

• AI

Identify and evaluate opportunities to apply AI - including generative AI, multi-agent systems - within products and solutions to deliver measurable business outcomes and drive operational efficiency.

• Supporting the Portfolios

Support Agile development teams to build and enhance a growing software portfolio, providing technical leadership throughout the technical design and sprint process and ensure the team delivers high quality work that aligns with the strategic standards within the global organisation.

Become a technical advocate improving communications with developers, analysts and have a good understanding of their challenges. Be able to recommend and implement improvements in the development process and conduct peer reviews of developers’ code if required.

Support the team in working towards continuous integration and continuous deployment, work to remove technical impediments raised by the team and proactively elevate relevant issues.

Proven experience (a minimum of three years) as a Solutions Architect or similar role, working within Agile frameworks and associated architectures, design, testing & deployment tools, including the following:

• CI/CD pipeline build & deployment tools
• Cloud experience (AWS & Azure) and serverless code deployment
• API (REST), API integration experience and API security experience, including OAuth 2.0
• Understanding of event-driven architecture
• Understanding of application security principles and practices, including authentication, access control, Single Sign-On (SSO), OAuth 2.0, threat modelling and integration with identity providers such as Microsoft Entra ID
• Experience of architecture modelling, e.g. UML, C4, business process modelling
• Familiarity with design thinking, behaviour and test-driven development, test-and-learn approaches
• Experience of SQL databases, Data warehouses
• Experience of Cloud migration (Azure, AWS)
• Knowledge of containerised deployments and optimisation techniques & tools
• Experience in using Jira & Confluence
• Experience of working within the full development lifecycle i.e. development, unit testing and release management
• Experience of source code repositories, branching and version control systems e.g. GIT
• A good understanding of AI concepts such as prompt engineering, LLMs, multi-agent systems and the broader AI ecosystem
• Experience in financial services or insurance is desirable but not essential - we welcome applications from strong technologists across all sectors.