Solution Architect

End Date
Monday 10 June 2024 Salary Range
£86,964 - £102,310 We support flexible working - click here for more information on flexible working options Flexible Working Options
Hybrid Working, Job Share Job Description Summary
Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) is a leading UK Digital bank, with over 16 million active online customers and is the country's largest mobile bank. LBG is significantly investing in digitising, modernising, and simplifying the group. LBG aims to: Grow our business: Serving more customers and businesses through a well-adapted investment case that gives us the confidence that we can grow profitably.
Focus on our existing business: As the UK’s largest retail and commercial financial services company, LBG must deliver in a manner that maximises our scale and desire for productivity.
Change how we operate: Invest in the skills of our people, and in the technology that underpins all our operations.
LBG is a purposeful business & its transformation agenda is underpinned by a ground-breaking approach to how we deliver financial services for our customers. This involves selecting the best of what we do currently and evolving it to bring business and technology closer together. To do this, LBG is establishing end-to-end, enduring teams which interact, align and collaborate as one team with technology, business, data and functional domain specialists working efficiently with shared objectives and interests. Our people have the autonomy to incrementally design, engineer, release, and operate one or more technology-enabled services for our customers. To support our Risk Data Foundations Team, LBG are looking for an experienced Solution Architects to define Cloud hosted (GCP) architecture solutions and designs that align with the Data and Technology Strategy and market leading customer experiences whilst simplifying and redefining the technology landscape. Our Purpose: For the Customers:
Support the Group’s growth ambitions through provision of risk data and insights that enable LBG toprovide customers with industry-leading risk data and insights services adequate financial protection respond to regulatory reporting
provide data centric decisions For our People:
To build collective ownership of our platform and delivery of our Risk Transformation vision through collaboration, engagement and respect - making us culturally a great place to work where our colleagues feel valued, included and empowered. Job Description About the role: You'll play critical role in designing solutions that can provide continuous flow of value to our customers and will be responsible for:

• collaborating with Product Owners, Platform Leads, Enterprise Architects & Engineers to ensure Risk solutions align to the Data and Technology Strategy through creation of application roadmaps and driving visibility of technical currency and application strategic alignment.
• partner with Enterprise Architecture & service providers to elaborate on solutions, their interfaces and validating technology patterns and assumptions, evaluating implementation alternatives whilst identifying software lifecycle risks, assumptions, issues & dependencies.
• provide analysis of options and deliver end-to-end solution designs using established architectural patterns as well as pioneering the adoption of new patterns that enable frequent incremental customer value delivery, improved customer experience, improved technical currency or simplified application estate.
• promote adaptive design practises to drive collaboration across Platform teams centring on a shared vision with continuous feedback and coaching to increase the capability of the technical community.
• participate in Agile ceremonies, shape, validate and present designs or prototypes that deliver customer outcomes that align to our GCP target architecture!
• bring the outside in leverage industry best-practise, frameworks, standards & policies in creating opportunities & value for our customers.
• create guiding principles and solution success criteria for platform capability or feature development across our Platforms.
• Champion quality & modernised architectures.
• support Product Owners & Platform Leads in identifying, articulating and impact assessing software & infrastructure currency risks or issues, offering options & recommendations on action planning & continuously ever-greening solutions/applications within the Platform.

Could this be the right fit for me? We need a leader in Solution Architecture who understands the challenges of modern architecture. You’ll build a compelling strategic vision and will understand a wide array of technology implications including people and process, bringing this to your comprehensive view of design. You'll have career experience as an Architect of Cloud hosted applications, having developed software engineering solutions and will be able to engage the Data Lab in your vision. You must be driven and engaging communicator who is happy working with a wide range of technical and non-technical colleagues. You would be able to produce high quality documentation tailored to the audience which would include senior team members. You'll need to be self-organised and be able to proactively prioritise your time. Your contribution will be instrumental to our strategy of simplifying, modernising, and de-risking the Group technology landscape, ensuring value for customers and shareholders. This is a key role driving the long-term sustainability and integrity of the organisation. If this is you, come and join our inclusive, values-led culture focused on making a difference. Apply today, we’d love to hear from you! We're in search of someone who...

• thrives in acquiring and applying findings to create customer and business value from data solutions.
• has significant experience of working with, and delivered technical designs and solutions for data mesh and warehouse applications
• has experiences working with multi-disciplinary product, feature or platform teams.
• is excited at the prospect of changing the status quo, inspiring change with new insights, ideas and encouraging experimentations or market research.
• has established systems engineering or solution architecture experience and appreciation of software engineering methods such as Behaviour and Test Driven Development.
• enjoys communicating and influencing collaborators with varying technical knowledge, influencing their thinking on the art of the possible through technology.
• can identify appropriate project, architecture, service or risk management methodologies that enable customer value realisation.
• is excited to translate varied technology requirements into relevant solutions.
• is well averse in defining solutions using Agile, Emergent and Intentional architecture methods.
• has substantive experiences defining architectural runways or solution architecture roadmaps for inclusive applications which span adaptive infrastructure domains.
• has established experiences partnering with other collaborators such as Enterprise, Security, Data & Infrastructure architects to create customer value or address business problems.
• holds proficient experiences leading activities associated with Architectural Governance, Risk Management or Compliance processes.
• will have shown experience of influencing and coaching peers, engineers and senior leaders with vision in the organisation.
• has appreciation for Architectural Frameworks such as TOGAF, Archimate, Software patterns or similar.
• understands how and where third party products could be appropriate, knowledge of technology purchasing processes and best practise.

What you'll need as a minimum;

• Developing and delivering architectural and design solution for data applications (mesh and warehouses)
• Experience of re-imagining legacy applications (Data Stage, SAS) into Cloud hosted (GCP) data mesh, microservices, using GCP/Cloud tooling (BigQuery, DBT, Dataflow, Looker, Filestore, Google Storage Buckets, Pub Sub, Springboot, Cloud Composer)
• Event Driven Architectures & Streaming Platforms (Kafka)
• Cloud Platform as a Service or similar offerings
• Cyber Security Architecture
• Data Architecture & Modelling
• Data Observability principles and tooling

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%
• An annual performance-related bonus
• Share schemes including free shares
• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping
• 30 days’ holiday, with bank holidays on top
• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies

Our continued commitment to helping Britain prosper means that as a colleague you can make a difference to customers, businesses and communities. Together we have a key role to play in shaping the bank of the future, whilst the scale and reach of our Group means you'll continue to have opportunities to learn, grow and develop. We're passionate about crafting a values-led culture, and our approach to inclusion and diversity means that we all have the chance to define a real difference, together. As part of the Group's commitments as a result of ring-fencing legislation, colleagues based in the Crown Dependencies are required to be exclusively dedicated to the non-ring-fenced bank and its subsidiaries. This means that colleagues who are based in the Crown Dependencies would not be able to undertake roles for the Ring Fenced Bank from their existing location and would need to consider relocation when applying for roles. At Lloyds Banking Group, we're driven by a clear purpose; to help Britain prosper. Across the Group, our colleagues are focused on making a difference to customers, businesses and communities. With us you'll have a key role to play in shaping the financial services of the future, whilst the scale and reach of our Group means you'll have many opportunities to learn, grow and develop. We keep your data safe. So, we'll only ever ask you to provide confidential or sensitive information once you have formally been invited along to an interview or accepted a verbal offer to join us which is when we run our background checks. We'll always explain what we need and why, with any request coming from a trusted Lloyds Banking Group person. We're focused on creating a values-led culture and are committed to building a workforce which reflects the diversity of the customers and communities we serve. Together we’re building a truly inclusive workplace where all of our colleagues have the opportunity to make a real difference.