Date: 16 Apr 2025
Company: Royal London Group
Senior Solutions Architect
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:
o Mobile/Web Architecture skills: iOS, Android, Flutter, ionic, Firebase, Splunk, AppDynamics, ForgeRock, OAuth 2.0/ SAML/ OIDC, SPA, PWA, CMS, Akamai/ Azure CDN.
o Languages: Angular, C, C#, Python, .NET, PowerShell.
o Integration skills: Kafka, Confluent, Event Hub, Pub/Sub, Messaging Platforms/ MQs, RESTful APIs and Open API specifications, GraphQL, EDA, MQ, WebSocket, DataBricks.
o Data: SQLDB, MongoDB, MariaDB, DataLake.
o CRM: Microsoft Dynamics 365.
o Containerisation and serverless architectures.
o 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.
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