Overview
The Technical Lead & Solution Architect role is responsible for leading the technical direction, engineering quality, and day-to-day delivery of digital products and internal systems.
The role provides hands-on technical leadership to squads while owning the solution architecture that ensures products and platforms remain scalable, secure, and future-ready.
They guide technical design, set engineering standards, and ensure solutions are built in line with architectural principles. They also define the architectural foundations, roadmaps, and integration patterns that support long-term business and technology goals, aligning the UK landscape with global enterprise architecture.
Key Responsibilities
* Act as Technical Lead for digital products & platform: own end-to-end solution architecture of all digital products, provide day‑to‑day oversight across squads, plan forward-looking architectural themes, evolve technology landscape, ensure product architectures are secure, scalable, and maintainable, offer hands‑on technical guidance, collaborate with Product Owners, Product Managers and Digital Asset Owners, translate technical requirements into Jira tickets, and identify technical risks with mitigation strategies.
* Documentation and Ownership of Architecture Artifacts: maintain the Architecture Repository, document and manage the country’s IT landscape, including applications, integrations, infrastructure, and data flows.
* Define and Manage Local Architecture: capture the current state (As‑Is), develop transition roadmaps (Transition Architecture), and co‑define target architecture (Target Architecture) in collaboration with Regional and Global Enterprise Architects.
* Produce Key Deliverables: maintain country‑specific artifacts such as Technology Reference Models, Data Flow Diagrams, and act as the owner and guardian of architecture artifacts, ensuring accuracy, relevance and compliance with global standards.
* Solution Design and Day‑to‑Day Architecture: oversee and support daily solution architecture efforts, provide mentorship to the local IT team, and ensure technical integrity.
* Governance and Standards Adherence: chair the Country Architecture Committee, represent the country in Regional Architecture Committee and global forums, enforce global architecture principles, conduct compliance checks, and ensure local IT solutions meet global standards.
* Convergence Program (When Applicable): lead architectural effort to decommission legacy systems, manage integration architecture across local-to-global, and ensure compliance with global roadmap and timelines.
* Collaboration and Stakeholder Engagement: work closely with the Country CIO and business units, provide detailed inputs to the Regional Architect, act as bridge between local IT teams and global/regional architecture teams.
* IT Modernisation and Innovation: identify opportunities for innovation, modernisation, and optimisation; lead adoption of global platform components, design secure and cost‑effective end‑to‑end architectures, align technology with business strategy, guide delivery teams, drive integration and innovation, and ensure governance and compliance through architectural integrity.
Personal Specification
* Ideally a degree in Computer Science or related fields or equivalent 7 years of experience as a Solution/IT Architect within services, consulting, or product companies.
* Flexible and able to balance product technical lead role, internal systems architecture, and wider group technology.
* Experience working across multiple domains, switching confidently between product roadmap, integration planning, internal IT improvements, and vendor engagements.
* Motivated by self‑development and self‑learning, maintaining up‑to‑date knowledge of emerging security trends and threats.
* Comfortable owning technical decisions end‑to‑end while remaining open to input.
* Experienced at creating detailed high‑quality documents (Application Architecture views, Data Flow diagrams, integration diagrams, technology reference models).
* Strong collaborator and builder of effective working relationships with internal teams, stakeholders across the organisation and vendors.
* Willingness to provide hands‑on support to technical teams when diagnosing and resolving design and platform issues.
* Well versed with architecture modelling languages and proven track record on solution architecture in cloud environments; good knowledge of Azure solutions.
* Good overall cloud architecture knowledge: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, new cloud services, CI/CD, monitoring/alerting, FinOps.
* Experience working with enterprise products and comprehending complex technical products and solutions.
* Knowledge of security best practices and compliance requirements, with experience implementing security controls and measures within solution architecture designs.
* Experience in payments, Benefits & Rewards Industry is a big advantage.
* Excellent presentation, documentation and stakeholder management skills.
* Ability to work in a multi‑country environment.
* English fluent; French is a plus.
Benefits
A meaningful job: helping build the future of employee benefits by creating sustainable and personalized experiences and making a real impact on millions of lives.
A great culture: a multicultural team that moves as one in a fast‑paced and innovative environment, respecting wellbeing, work‑life balance and new ideas.
An empowering environment: an inclusive workplace celebrating diversity and offering equal learning and growth opportunities.
Location: Milton Keynes, UK.
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