Job Description

Job Title: Senior Solutions Architect

Contract Type: Permanent

Location: Alderley Edge, South Manchester

Working style: Hybrid 50% home/office based

Closing date: 30th April 2025

At Royal London Group we're on a journey to modernise and transform our technology landscape to provide customer-centric products and services. Our business employs over 6000 people in the UK, Ireland and focusses on a range of Financial Services including Pensions (Individual, Workplace, ISA), Insurance / Protection, Long-Term Savings, Bulk Purchase Annuities across new and long-standing customers. We are looking for hands-on, Cloud- / Azure-native Senior Solution Architects to help us modernise from legacy platforms to a future-ready architecture.

Why Join Us?

You enjoy driving results from transforming monolithic, mainframe-based platforms into cloud-native, event-driven, API-first architectures. Embed architecture patterns and reusable frameworks that make engineering teams more efficient. Work with Azure's latest technologies--AKS, API Management, Event Grid, Cosmos DB, Terraform, and help us deliver against our Cloud strategy Make a real impact in a UK Mutual, shaping technology that serves millions of members, growing stronger since 1861. This year we are sharing 181 million of our profits with over 2 million eligible customers.

Who We're Looking For?

Someone who is regarded as a technical leader and is sought out for technical direction and thought leadership Active input to establishing and reviewing architecture artefacts, e.g. High-Level Design template Mentoring and helping to develop the capabilities of solution architects A Senior Solution Architect with deep expertise in Azure Cloud, Integration, and Domain-Driven Design (DDD). Ability to create patterns that engineers can deploy as code using Terraform, Bicep, ARM templates. Hands-on experience in modernising legacy applications, cloud migration strategies, and hybrid architectures. Passionate about engineering excellence, governance, and delivering long-term business value.

Skills

Assist Principal Architect on TCO of Platform Meet budget targets via re-charge model Cost effective solutions in own and other projects, including projected costs over time Impact of cost reduction exercises ensuring services are not negatively impacted Review of cost within third-party or outsourced IT provision and the ability to apply Cloud-native well architected frameworks. Expertise in cloud-native design patterns (hybrid: Azure / AWS / GCP) and best practices including networking, compute, security, cost optimisation and data services. Strong Knowledge of microservice architectures, Domain Driven Design, Event Driven Architecture, and API-led integration. Understanding of how architectural designs translate into real-world engineering constructs such as Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, APIs, event-driven workflows. Ability to work with engineering teams to ensure patterns are easily consumable and deployable. E.g. Terraform, ARM templates, Bicep for Azure. Experience of modernisation and migration strategies including rehost, refactor, rearchitect, rebuild, replace. Use of Architecture Frameworks: TOGAF / ZACHMAN / C4 modelling on EA Toolsets such as Ardoq, BizzDesign, Orbus Infinity, ArchiMate. Understanding of Policy as Code - embedding compliance and governance into DevSecOps workflows. Awareness of Regulatory guidelines (FCA, PRA) and how they impact technical designs. Ability to align technical decisions with business goals, ensuring solutions are customer-centric and deliver member value and operational resilience. Interest in actively contributing to reusable frameworks that accelerate future solution development. Background in Software Engineering with experience in modern languages, reusable patterns and frameworks such as: + Mobile/Web Architecture skills: iOS, Android, Flutter, ionic, Firebase, Splunk, AppDynamics, ForgeRock, OAuth 2.0/ SAML/ OIDC, SPA, PWA, CMS, Akamai/ Azure CDN
+ Languages: Angular, C, C#, Python, .NET, PowerShell
+ Integration skills: Kafka, Confluent, Event Hub, Pub/Sub, Messaging Platforms/ MQs, RESTful APIs and Open API specifications, GraphQL, EDA, MQ, WebSocket, DataBricks
+ Data: SQLDB, MongoDB, MariaDB, DataLake
+ CRM: Microsoft Dynamics 365
+ Containerisation and serverless architectures
+ Understanding of Capability models, Data and Process integration strategies across software/application architecture

Desirable

Knowledge of Pensions, Insurance / Protection, Long Term Savings, Bulk Purchase Annuities, ISA



If you want to be at the forefront of Cloud adoption in Financial Services - while working on real-world transformation challenges for the benefit of our society - this is the role for you.