JOB TITLE: Solution Architect

SALARY: £70,929 - £78,810

LOCATION: Manchester

HOURS: Full-time

WORKING PATTERN: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week, or 40% of our time, at our Manchester office

About this opportunity

The Smarter Journeys Lab sits within the Colleague Channels Platform. Our mission is to create re-usable colleague and customer solutions that are highly intuitive and automated, underpinned by a modern infrastructure which enables a highly flexible and responsive workforce. This will provide customers with a choice of channels that are consistent, easy to access and navigate between. The Platform sits within Consumer Relationships and plays a critical role in providing services across the whole Group.

What will I be doing?

The Solution Architect is vital in ensuring the products we deliver are fit for purpose and meet the quality and standards that our customers expect. You'll realise business value by delivering reliable, scalable and working software to our customers & colleagues. You'll be responsible for the design, architecture decisions and defining the end-to-end impacts (both functional and non-functional). You should also be comfortable communicating information to different customers, from business partners to the engineering community.

As a Senior Solution Architect, you'll 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.

• Collaborating with Product Owners, Platform Leads, Enterprise Architects & Engineers to create the Architectural runway for our Platform teams.

• 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.

• Be responsible for the technical design risks or issues and driving resolution through architectural or agile practises.

• Setting guiding principles and solution success criteria for platform capability or feature development across our Platforms.

• Take designs through governance processes with meaningful architectural artefacts and ensure the required engineering and architecture cohorts are engaged as required throughout the design phase.

• Providing oversight & foster built in quality, decoupled & modernised architectures.

• Makes a significant improvement on short-term or long-term business performance by recommending authoritative technical and/or professional solutions.

Why Lloyds Banking Group

We're on an exciting journey and there couldn't be a better time to join us. The investments we're making in our people, data, and technology are leading to innovative projects, fresh possibilities, and countless new ways for our people to work, learn, and thrive.

What you'll need

• Strong experience of solution design, security & resilience patterns.

• Strong knowledge of microservice architecture, containerisation, Event Driven Architectures & Streaming Platforms.

• Strong understanding of building applications through containerised microservices-based architectures, with good understanding of cloud methodologies.

• Strong understanding of API standards, security and gateway patterns.

• Strong understanding of data technologies - SQL/NoSQL, Big Data.

• Good knowledge of key LBG development technologies (e.g. Java, JavaScript, Java Spring Boot, Python).

• Good knowledge of cloud architecture, cloud platform as a service, particularly GCP.

• Good understanding of AI/ML concepts and models including Agentic AI.

• Good understanding of Data Architecture & Modelling concepts.

• Appreciation for Architectural Frameworks such as TOGAF, Archimate, Software patterns or similar.

• Experience of Cloud patterns and associated technologies, preferably GCP, CI/CD (Jenkins, Harness), Containerisation, Orchestration, IAM, VPC, GKE

• Exposure and familiarity with monitoring and logging tools such as Dynatrace and Splunk.

• A solid understanding of networking, firewalls, load balancing, and cloud security patterns.

• Experience of API Management tools such as IBM API-Connect, Apigee X or similar.

About working for us

Our ambition is to be the leading UK business for diversity, equity and inclusion supporting our customers, colleagues and communities and we're committed to creating an environment in which everyone can thrive, learn and develop.

We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer Initiative.

We offer reasonable workplace adjustments for colleagues with disabilities, including flexibility in office attendance, location and working patterns. And, as a Disability Confident Leader, we guarantee interviews for a fair and proportionate number of applicants who meet the minimum criteria for the role with a disability, long-term health or neurodivergent condition through the Disability Confident Scheme.

We provide reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process to reduce or remove barriers. Just let us know what you need.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%

• An annual bonus award, subject to Group performance

• Share schemes including free shares

• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping

• 30 days' holiday, with bank holidays on top

• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies

Want to do amazing work, that's interesting and makes a difference to millions of people? Join our journey.