Senior Solution Architect x 5 Location: Northampton (or Knutsford for local candidates) Type: Permanent / Hybrid (2 days on-site weekly) Salary: Up to £93,000 About the Opportunity Are you a highly experienced Solution Architects looking to make a significant impact within a leading financial institution? We're hiring five Principal-level architects to spearhead the design and delivery of groundbreaking solutions. You'll tackle complex business challenges, shaping our technological future by creating impactful solutions that expertly balance innovation with robust risk management. This is your chance to drive consistency and excellence across an evolving digital landscape. Key Responsibilities Architect Scalable Solutions: Lead the design and development of scalable solutions, ensuring alignment with cutting-edge software engineering practices and automated delivery tools. This includes selecting and integrating appropriate technologies. Cloud Maximization: Strategically design solutions to fully leverage cloud capabilities, including serverless, containerization, and intelligent workload placement, to maximize benefits like elasticity. Secure & Resilient Design: Create highly secure and resilient architectures, incorporating principles like defense in depth and blast radius reduction, to meet the institution's stringent expectations. Risk-Value Optimization: Expertly balance risks and controls within your designs to consistently deliver significant business and technology value. Standardization Advocate: Champion the adoption of standardized solutions, contributing to their ongoing evolution when custom approaches are necessary. Operational Support: Provide critical fault-finding and performance issue support to operational teams, utilizing available tooling and expertise. Impact Assessment: Conduct comprehensive solution design impact assessments covering risk, capacity, and cost, including detailed estimations for project changes and ongoing operational expenses. Governance Adherence: Develop all necessary architectural inputs and artifacts to ensure full compliance with the institution's governance processes, spanning architecture, privacy, security, and records management. Strategic Input: Contribute significantly to setting strategy, driving requirements, and making key recommendations for change, including resource planning, budgets, and policy development. Leadership & Mentorship: Demonstrate clear leadership behaviors (Listen, Energise, Align, Develop) to foster a thriving environment and advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership and senior management, on critical areas of impact. Skills & Experience Required Proven expertise in architecting modern distributed systems. Exceptional stakeholder management and influencing skills, with a demonstrated ability to navigate complex architectural trade-offs and resolve challenging problems. Extensive experience creating transitional architectures that effectively leverage existing heritage systems. Experience within financial services (e.g., Banking, Cards, Loans). Ability to architect systems within public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP). Manage technical product selection processes, scope, and execute technical spikes/proofs of concept. What Next If you're a Senior Solution Architect eager to drive innovation and significantly contribute to the digital evolution of a leading financial institution, apply now! GCS is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy