Senior Solutions Architect

Date: 16 Apr 2025

Company: Royal London Group

Contract Type: Permanent

Working style: Hybrid 50% home/office based

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 focuses 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.
• 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.

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.