Enterprise Architect/Senior Solution Architect - Insurance or Financial Services ideally
£700-£770 Per day - Outside IR35 - 3 days on site per week in London
We are looking for a hands-on Enterprise Architect with a strong application architecture background to support complex technology initiatives across the UK and Europe.
The role will work closely with business stakeholders, engineering teams and delivery functions to understand new initiatives, define the required technology approach and produce the architecture artefacts needed to move projects into delivery.
The EA practice at our client are responsible for defining and governing the target-state technology architecture across the company, ensuring alignment with Global architecture strategy while enabling cloud adoption, application modernisation, and digital transformation initiatives.
With key initiatives in flight, we have a need to bolster the EA team to primarily support UK/EU initiatives and where required international projects. The role will report into a lead EA resource based in the UK but will be a part of the Global EA function adhering to standards and frameworks.
Key Responsibilities
- Develop and maintain business capability maps and supporting technology roadmaps.
- Partner with business leaders to identify transformation opportunities and prioritise technology investments.
- Provide architectural leadership and oversight for complex and business-critical technology initiatives.
- Drive application portfolio rationalisation and technical debt reduction initiatives.
- Define and govern the target-state business, application, data, and technology architecture, ensuring alignment to business strategy and global standards.
- Provide architectural leadership and governance across engineering, platform, data, security, and delivery teams.
- Support the development and governance of cloud architecture standards, migration patterns, optimisation approaches, and operational best practices across UK/EU and International operations.
- Act as a key participant in developing standards and company wide best practices for engineering complex and large-scale technology solutions for technology engineering disciplines.
- Specification of technologies, application architectures and data structures as a basis for application for internal assets.
- Establish architecture principles and design standards that ensure solutions are secure, scalable, resilient, cost-effective, and aligned with enterprise objectives.
- For internal assets, support Application Managers to develop and maintain the Product Roadmap, monitoring change and performing reviews as needed.
- Manage architecture exceptions for applications, including identifying, documenting, taking through exception approval process, and remediation where and when possible.
- Monitor application services to ensure performance consistently meets non-functional requirements (response time, security etc.)
- Work with the Application Manager/Technical/Solution Architects in defining, analysing, planning, measuring, and improving product availability and continuity.
Experience Required
- Strong experience as an Enterprise Architect with a background in application, software or solution architecture.
- Deep understanding of enterprise applications and application architecture, data flows and cloud archtitecture.
- Experience designing complex applications, services, APIs, integrations and event-driven solutions.
- Proven ability to take an initiative from an early-stage business requirement through to a defined, delivery-ready architecture.
- Strong experience with Cloud preferably Azure nice to have the Azure Cloud Architect Certification.
- Experience with enterprise architecture frameworks such as TOGAF, Zachman, FEAF, or equivalent.
- Strong experience with PaaS, IaaS & PaaS services; understands leading practices and adoption patterns.
- Strong experience conducting stakeholder discovery and translating business needs into clear technical requirements.
- Ability to work independently, bringing structure and direction to technically complex or initially undefined initiatives.
- Experience producing high-quality architecture artefacts, technical specifications, solution designs and decision records.
- Strong understanding of application integration, data flows, security, resilience, scalability, performance and availability
- Experience working directly with software engineering, DevOps, security, data and delivery teams.
- Good understanding of Legacy application modernisation, application rationalisation and technical debt.
- Familiarity with cloud-hosted environments is beneficial, but this is primarily an application and software
- Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain technical solutions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Insurance or regulated-industry experience would be advantageous.
The Ideal Candidate
You will be a pragmatic and self-sufficient Enterprise Architect who can take ownership when a new initiative emerges. You will engage with stakeholders, clarify what they are trying to achieve and independently develop the architecture, specifications and supporting artefacts required to move the initiative confidently into delivery
Reasonable Adjustments:
Respect and equality are core values to us. We are proud of the diverse and inclusive community we have built, and we welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and perspectives. Our success is driven by our people, united by the spirit of partnership to deliver the best resourcing solutions for our clients.
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