Salary: £49,680 - 51,800 per year Requirements: We are looking for an experienced Architect with a strong track record of designing and governing service-oriented or microservice-based systems. We require deep expertise in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and distributed system design. We need experience with messaging, data interoperability, and practical approaches to breaking down monolithic patterns. We expect you to be confident evaluating communication protocols, service contracts, service boundaries, and integration approaches. We are looking for someone who can balance performance, resilience, and maintainability in architecture decisions. We need experience guiding development teams and influencing stakeholders in environments where the architectural direction is still evolving. Responsibilities: We will expect you to assess the current architecture in depth and identify how services have been implemented and how they interact. We need you to uncover where legacy monolithic behaviours are still influencing design. We will ask you to identify architectural gaps, risks, and technical debt and define the changes needed to create a consistent service environment. We need you to shape and mature our SOA, including service communication, data flow, and service boundary design. We will rely on you to determine whether a message bus or event-driven architecture is the best fit. We need you to evaluate how real-time, configuration, and scientific data should flow reliably across the environment. We expect you to produce architectural detail including diagrams, logical models, communication patterns, service contracts, API standards, and integration principles. We will look to you to work closely with engineers, product teams, and scientific stakeholders to align services with SOA best practice. We need you to challenge assumptions, lead architectural conversations, and provide clear direction for a scalable and sustainable future architecture. Technologies: API Architect Cloud Flow Support More: We are a nationally significant scientific and engineering organisation operating in one of the UKs most complex technical environments. As part of our long-term digital modernisation, we are moving from legacy monolithic applications to a cloud-based, service-oriented ecosystem that will support our experimental workflows, data services, and operational capabilities. This is a 12-month contract role, inside IR35, offering a competitive daily rate of £680 to £700, with an immediate start and a location near Oxford requiring 3 to 4 days onsite initially. You will join a forward-thinking, engineering-focused culture where your architectural leadership will have immediate impact and long-term strategic importance as we build a scalable, future-proof service architecture. last updated 21 week of 2026