Advert Reference Number: 1153 Job Location: Milton Keynes, Remote/Hybrid Department: Engineering Salary: £47,389 to £56,535 + Market Related Pay of £5653.50 per year until 30 September 2027 initially Closing Date: 12 November 2025 Weekly Working Hours: 37 Contract Type: Permanent Fixed Term Contract: End Date: Not Applicable Welsh Language: Not Applicable
Change your career, change lives
The Open University is the UK’s largest university, a world leader in flexible part‑time education combining a mission to widen access to higher education with research excellence, transforming lives through education. Find out more about us and our mission by watching this short video (you will be taken to YouTube by clicking this link).
About the Role
As a Specialist Architect (Salesforce Marketing Cloud) at The Open University, you will be responsible for bringing deep technical expertise to a conversation. You ensure that the relevant policies and standards related to your area of specialism are in place and understood - to support students in achieving their learning outcomes through the Open University. You will drive innovation and adoption of new technologies in your area of specialism.
As a technical leader and problem solver with a can‑do attitude, tackling complex technical challenges you will work with teams inside Digital Services and across the University in defining, agreeing and ensuring that others are kept aware of ongoing developments in your area of expertise.
About Digital Services
Digital Services is at the heart of delivering life‑changing learning experiences that enrich society. We combine trusted design, data expertise, and cutting‑edge technology to support lifelong learning.
Our objectives are to:
* Enhance the student and staff experience through simple, evidence‑based solutions.
* Deliver value iteratively, securely, and at speed.
* Foster a vibrant, supportive workplace that embraces continuous learning and growth, empowering everyone to succeed.
As a service‑led institution, we are committed to simplifying and improving how we work by organising ourselves around the services we provide. This enables us to design and deliver outstanding services effectively and efficiently.
With our ethos of being “open to people, places, methods, and ideas,” we proudly support students in every setting imaginable—from submarines to prisons, and everywhere in between. We take pride in enabling our academics to teach and our students to learn, no matter the circumstances.
Key Responsibilities
* Develop and enforce architecture standards and best practices for OU technology strategies, particularly in relation to marketing automation. Make decisions around the technology landscape in a collaborative manner with teams inside the domain and across the wider University.
* Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineering teams as well as ensuring alignment to standards & frameworks, alongside creating and promoting the reuse of patterns.
* Design and implement automated infrastructure provisioning, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and other DevOps practices to streamline operations and reduce manual intervention.
* Co‑create and document the target architecture, reference architectures, policies and standards – sharing these with teams to support faster delivery of features whilst meeting expectations around Security, Stability, Scalability, Speed and Spend.
* Act as an advocate for continuous conversational architecture governance– ensuring that solutions are aligned to strategy, policy, standards.
* Support the team in balancing the tension between build, run and improve – managing key metrics and ensuring that compromises are understood and documented, with mitigations included in the overall product roadmap.
* Keep up to date with trends in Higher Education, technology, architecture and engineering - advocating an attitude to be open to new ways of working which could improve productivity and delivery.
* Be a trusted advisor to the Head of Enterprise Architecture, the Head of Engineering for the domain and across the wider University, and in the development of the architecture profession.
* Support the re‑use and availability of trusted data, through use of approved integration and data sharing tools, in order to support the OU in making good decisions.
* Participate in show and tell sessions, and other activities to share successes with others to celebrate what the team has achieved and enable other teams within the domain or across Digital Services and the University to learn from it.
* Be an active member of the OU architecture profession, supporting other architects and contributing to overall development and knowledge of all architects.
* Support the administration and maintenance of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, proactively resolving issues yourself, or in collaboration with others, and ensure availability and performance.
About You
Essential:
* Experience as a Salesforce Marketing Cloud architect and/or administrator.
* A track record in implementing strategic architectural changes to support business goals.
* Experience in migrating marketing software, understanding the cost and performance of the solution and how this changes in the new architecture.
* Experience of the shift towards a DevOps, CI/CD culture and practices (e.g. automation) to increase flow, frequent feedback and ongoing learning and to support the shared success of achieving team and domain outcomes.
* An understanding of how SaaS solutions contribute to a heterogenous architectural landscape alongside custom solutions to support competitive advantage.
* Excellent verbal and written communication skills, to suit a variety of stakeholders with varying degrees of technical expertise.
* An appreciation of the role of implementation partners and 3rd party support teams.
* An understanding of how architects can support multi-disciplinary teams working in an agile manner to achieve constant improvement in outcomes.
* Awareness of architecture frameworks and patterns and how they support the development and maintenance of software.
* Strong organisational skills and a logical mindset, to support effective and expedient decision making.
Desirable:
* Experience working with diverse, geographically distributed teams, both onshore and offshore, utilising a variety of technologies to maintain a digitally connected environment.
* Experience in matrix management across product teams and within a profession.
* Experience in line management of architects or other engineers.
Behaviours:
* Leadership and Mentoring: You lead by example, providing guidance and support to team members, and fostering a collaborative and inclusive team environment.
* Analytical and Strategic Thinking: You are capable of understanding complex business challenges and developing strategic technical solutions to address them.
* Proactive and Innovative: You actively seek out opportunities for improvement and are eager to integrate new technologies and methodologies into your work.
* Attention to Detail: You ensure accuracy and quality in all aspects of your work, from coding and testing to documentation and analysis.
* Effective Communicator: You are able to convey technical concepts to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders, ensuring clear understanding and alignment.
Support with your application
If you have any questions, or need support or adjustments relating to your application, the recruitment process, or the role, please contact us on 01908 541111 or email careers@open.ac.uk quoting the advert reference number.
What's in it for you?
At The Open University, we offer a range of benefits to recognise and reward great work, alongside policies and flexible working that contribute towards a great work life balance. Get all the details of what benefits we offer by visiting our Staff Benefits page (clicking this link will open a new window).
Flexible working
We are open to discussions about flexible working. Whether it’s a job share, part time, compressed hours or another working arrangement. Please reach out to us to discuss what works best for you.
It is anticipated that a hybrid working pattern can be adopted for this role, where the successful candidate can work from home and the office. However, as this role is contractually aligned to our Milton Keynes office it is expected that some attendance in the office will be required when necessary and in response to business needs. We’d expect this to be approximately once per week.
Next steps in the Recruitment process
We anticipate that there will be a two‑stage interview process for this role with the first stage taking place online via Microsoft Teams during the week commencing 17 November 2025.
Early closing date notification
We may close this job advert earlier than the published closing date where a satisfactory number of applications are received. We would therefore encourage early applications.
How to apply
To apply for this role please submit the following documents:
* CV
* A personal statement of up to 1000 words. You should set out in your statement why you are interested in the role and provide examples of where your skills and experience meet the essential requisites for this role as detailed in the job description.
You can view your progress and application communications when you are logged into our recruitment system. Please check your spam/junk folders if you do not receive associated email updates.
Contact us
If you have any queries or questions about the recruitment process, or regarding your application, please contact: careers@open.ac.uk .
Equal Opportunities
The Open University is committed to equality, diversity and inclusion which is reflected in our mission to be open to people, places, methods and ideas. We aim to foster a diverse and inclusive environment so that all in our OU community can reach their potential. We recognise that different people bring different perspectives, ideas, knowledge, and culture, and that this difference brings great strength. We strive to recruit, retain and develop the careers of a diverse pool of students and staff, and particularly encourage applications from all under‑represented groups. We also aspire to make The Open University a supportive workplace for all through our policies, services and staff networks.
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