Kafka Architect /Solution Architect – Transformation Programme
Contract | Inside IR35
2 Days Onsite per Week – Canary Wharf
£750–£800 per day
About the Organisation
Our client is a well-established SaaS-led organisation operating within a highly regulated environment, delivering digital products used across financial and operational industries. The company is embarking on a major transformation programme to streamline and modernise its internal systems, enabling faster product delivery, improved scalability, and a more cohesive technology ecosystem.
The programme aims to redesign the internal application landscape to ensure systems work together seamlessly—improving engineering velocity, reliability, and the organisation’s ability to bring new products to market.
The Role
We are seeking an experienced Kafka Architect/Solution Architect to join the transformation project with the full programme expected to run 12 months or longer.
You will lead architectural thinking, define the technical blueprint, and guide engineering practices to support the creation of a unified system landscape that enables smoother product deployment and improved platform cohesion.
This is a hands-on leadership role working closely with engineering, product, architecture, and business stakeholders.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership & Architecture
* Lead technical discovery to assess the current application, integration and infrastructure landscape.
* Own architectural decisions and produce technical specifications to enable a clear transformation roadmap.
* Define a cohesive system architecture across front-end, middleware, APIs, and backend data services.
* Support the creation and prioritisation of backlogs for engineering teams to deliver against.
Engineering Strategy & Delivery
* Mentor and guide a small group of engineers, promoting strong engineering and delivery discipline.
* Oversee and shape the end-to-end SDLC, ensuring consistency across development, testing, DevOps and release processes.
* Advocate for modern engineering practices including automation, containerisation, and continuous delivery.
* Identify opportunities to leverage AI and automation within the SDLC to improve engineering productivity.
Platform & Infrastructure
* Work across both public cloud and on-prem environments with an emphasis on containerised services (e.g., Kubernetes).
* Ensure infrastructure aligns to the new target architecture and supports scalable, reliable product delivery.
* Contribute to decisions on integration patterns, data flows, APIs, microservices and broader platform modernisation.
Skills & Experience
Essential
* Multiple years’ experience operating at Kafka Architect/Solution Architect level within SaaS organisations (ideally with exposure to financial services or regulated industries).
* Strong full-stack engineering background, with the ability to design and evaluate front-end, middleware, and backend architectures.
* Experience mentoring, coaching or managing small engineering teams.
* Proven ownership of architectural decisions, technical specifications and shaping of engineering backlogs.
* Hands-on experience improving SDLC effectiveness, including:
* Experience across Kafka and Kubernetes
* CI/CD
* Release management
* Strong understanding of infrastructure automation and containerisation (Kubernetes).
* Ability to work across cloud and on-prem environments.
Desirable
* Background in Java engineering (not essential).
* Experience with multi-cloud or hybrid architectures.
* Exposure to AI adoption within engineering processes.
Engagement Details
* Day Rate: £700–£800 (Inside IR35)
* Location: Canary Wharf – 2 days onsite
* Start Date: ASAP