Lead Solution Architect

£70,000 to 90,000 GBP

Bonus

Hybrid WORKING

Location: Glasgow, Scotland - United Kingdom Type: Permanent

Lead Solution Architect
Glasgow (Hybrid)
Up to £90,000 + bonus

We're looking for a Lead Solution Architect to design and deliver secure, scalable, and resilient technology solutions across a complex, regulated environment. This is a senior, influential role where you'll shape end-to-end architecture, working closely with engineering, product, security, and business stakeholders to solve high-impact problems and drive consistency across platforms.

You'll take ownership of solution design from concept through to delivery, balancing business outcomes, technology strategy, risk, and regulatory requirements.

What you'll be doing

Solution & Architecture Design

• Design and evolve solution architectures that address complex business needs using modern engineering practices and automated delivery.
• Create solution blueprints that leverage cloud-native capabilities such as containerisation, serverless, and elastic scaling.
• Define workload placement strategies across on-prem and cloud to optimise performance, resilience, cost, and security.

API & Integration Architecture

• Lead the design of secure, scalable RESTful APIs (OpenAPI/Swagger).
• Define standards for API gateways, authentication (OAuth2, mTLS), traffic management, rate limiting, and observability.
• Design integration patterns connecting internal systems with external partners and third-party ecosystems.

Security, Resilience & Risk

• Embed security-by-design principles including defence in depth and reduced blast radius.
• Ensure solutions meet resilience, availability, and regulatory expectations.
• Balance risk, controls, and delivery to maximise business value while maintaining strong governance.

Governance & Assurance

• Produce architecture artefacts for design, security, privacy, and records management governance.
• Assess solutions for cost, capacity, performance, and operational impact.
• Support operational teams with fault finding, performance analysis, and continuous improvement.

Leadership & Influence

• Act as a senior technical authority, guiding architectural direction and standards.
• Influence senior stakeholders and align product, engineering, security, and compliance teams.
• Mentor architects and engineers, contributing to the growth of the architecture community.

What we're looking for

• Proven experience as a Solution Architect in financial services or similarly regulated environments.
• Strong background designing and securing RESTful APIs and integration platforms.
• Deep understanding of:
  • API gateways, OAuth2, mTLS, monitoring and rate limiting
  • Cloud and hybrid architectures (container platforms, serverless, event-driven systems)
• Experience embedding regulatory and security requirements into architecture (e.g. PSD2, ISO 20022, GDPR).
• Ability to translate complex technical designs into clear business-focused outcomes.
• Strong stakeholder management and governance experience.

Highly valued experience

• Banking domains such as payments, onboarding, transaction processing, or treasury.
• Modern messaging and event platforms (Kafka, MQ, real-time streaming).
• Navigating and modernising legacy estates alongside cloud-native platforms.
• Architecture economics: cost modelling, capacity planning, and optimisation.

Why join

• Shape the architecture of large-scale, business-critical systems.
• Influence strategy, standards, and long-term technology direction.
• Work in a senior, visible role with real impact across security, resilience, and digital transformation.
• Hybrid working with a Glasgow base and a competitive salary and bonus package.

If you're an experienced architect who enjoys solving complex problems, designing secure and scalable API-led platforms, and influencing technology direction at enterprise scale, we'd love to hear from you.