Senior Solution Architect - Bristol

FDM is a global business and technology consultancy seeking a Senior Solution Architect in Bristol to work for our client within the Finance sector. This is initially a 12-month contract.

Become part of Commercial Lending as a Senior Solution Architect and seize a unique opportunity to influence the future of digital banking. Our client’s mission to build a bank of the future is driven by their extensive transformation programme. This role offers you the opportunity to work on ambitious projects within the commercial lending platform, focusing on delivering exceptional digital journeys. If you're passionate about customer success, innovation, and leading transformative technology initiatives, this is the perfect opportunity for you.

Our client is creating exciting opportunities to improve customer experiences for our Commercial Cards clients for years to come. They’re looking for a Senior Solution Architect to drive the delivery of reliable, scalable, and functionally rich software solutions. You'll be tasked with a variety of responsibilities that are crucial to our client’s success, this is a senior leadership level role and will blend both technical expertise with great passion for coaching and developing people including advocation for team wellbeing.

Responsibilities

• Collaborating with product owners, platform leads, enterprise architects & engineers to create the architectural runway for our client’s platform teams. Once baselined, the solution architects continuously invest in maintaining the architecture runway underpinning our platform teams
• Partner with enterprise architecture & service providers to elaborate on solutions, their interfaces and validating technology assumptions, evaluating implementation alternatives and software lifecycle risks, assumptions, issues & dependencies
• Providing analysis of options and deliver end-to-end solution designs using relevant architectural building blocks as well as producing designs for features that enable frequent incremental customer value delivery
• Promoting adaptive design practises to drive collaboration across Platform teams centring on a common vision with continuous feedback
• Owning the technical design risks or issues and driving resolution through architectural or agile practises
• Participating in Agile ceremonies, elicit requirements, shape & validate designs or prototypes that deliver customer outcomes that align to our target architecture
• Leveraging industry best practise, frameworks, standards & policies in creating opportunities & value for our customers
• Contributing to the financial investment process to obtain funding for key solution opportunities
• Setting guiding principles and solution success criteria for platform capability or feature development across our client’s Platforms
• Providing oversight & foster built in quality, decoupled & modernised architectures
• Supporting product owners & platform leads in identifying, articulating and impact assessing software & infrastructure currency risks or issues, offering options & recommendations on action planning & continuously evergreening solutions/systems within the platform
• Supporting product owners & platform Leads on the technical aspect of activities linked with platform financial estimation, spend or risk management processes in line with the platform roadmap
• As a Senior Solution Architect, you will also hold overall responsibility for leading and directing a diverse workforce to achieve the business strategy, inspiring people, achieving their full commitment to do the extraordinary

• Experienced working in multi-disciplinary product, feature, or platform teams
• Experience in systems engineering or solution architecture with appreciation of software development processes such as behaviour driven development & test-driven development
• Enjoy communicating & influencing audiences with little or no technical knowledge while aligning recommendations to organisational strategy & imperatives
• Worked with collaborators to influence their thinking about what is possible through technology innovation
• Have understanding & experiences in applying different project, architecture, life cycling and risk management methods to bring in customer value
• Demonstrate strong understanding of solution & software architecture patterns
• Experience in defining and/or operating environments embracing Agile Architecture, Emergent & Intentional architecture techniques
• Experience of systems or solutions development, change lifecycle, release management at web-scale
• Experience in partnering & collaborating with Enterprise, security, data & infrastructure architects to create customer value or tackle business problems
• Proficient & demonstrable experience in leading activities associated to Architectural Governance, Risk Management or Compliance processes
• Familiarity of Architectural Frameworks such as TOGAF, Archimate, Cloud Architectures or similar
• Have an ability to understand how and where third-party products could be deployed, including solid understanding of vendor evaluation and selection processes & best practises
• Prior experience in Mobile native, Cross platform/Hybrid App, API Gateway Management and microservices domain

• Career coaching and access to upskilling throughout your entire FDM career
• Initial upskilling pre-assignment that has been accredited by TechSkills  
• Assignments with global companies and opportunities to work abroad 
• Opportunity to obtain certifications from Microsoft, Salesforce, Cisco and more
• Access to the Buy As You Earn share scheme