Solution Architects
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
The Solution Architects are part of the Architecture practice within the CTO organisation which reports into the Chief Technology Officer. Solution Architects take primary responsibility for the design and end-to-end solutions for change delivered through project, programme, value stream, and innovation initiatives, aligned to the Enterprise Principles, Roadmaps and Vision. In this context, the focus is on designing and deploying AI-enabled capabilities into the EUI estate, ensuring they are integrated cleanly into customer experience journeys and the core back-end systems (Guidewire) through well-governed, reusable integration patterns.
Solution Architects champion technology standards, standard patterns, and best practices including reuse of successful solutions elsewhere in the Admiral Group - particularly those required to operationalise AI within EUI (e.g., secure and resilient integration, event/request-response patterns, orchestration, automation, and delivery pipelines). They feed their depth of knowledge and expertise into the enterprise roadmaps, and lead and take part in governance forums to develop and ensure the on-going conformity to the enterprise roadmap and Admiral's technology standards.
Solution Architects provide the value streams with technology consultancy and design support grounded in subject-matter expertise and experience. They work with the Lead Solution Architects, Senior and Staff Engineers, and Heads of Tech to ensure roadmap alignment, and ensure optimal use of enterprise assets - especially via the AI & Integration Capability Hub, spanning real-time integration (Tibco, API Management, Azure Integration Services), managed file transfers (MoveIT), automation (RPA, UiPath, Logic Apps), and CI/CD enablement (Azure DevOps).
Main Duties
- Together with Lead Solution Architects, provide strong technical solutions for value streams, own those solutions from ideation to delivery, and ensure that business value can be realised through the correct implementation of the solutions.
- Lead and contribute to governance forums, ensuring solutions adhere to established standards and patterns, identifying and controlling divergences, and escalating where necessary.
- Build productive relationships with technical and business stakeholders to maintain alignment of technology and business strategies.
- Contribute to and help maintain a detailed understanding of the architecture for the value stream.
- Produce documentation of a high-quality and to a detailed level, ensuring that all decision points, building blocks, principles, rationale, roadmaps, and all interdependencies are understood, documented, and communicated across value streams.
- Contribute to the architecture repository using the Admiral architecture modelling tools and language.
- Write, or contributes to, articles, and papers and speak at conferences, user groups, or specialist subject groups on topics involved in Architecture. Play a leading role in special interest groups concerned with specialist field.
- Promote Architecture within Admiral and closely associated organisations.
- Support innovation by research, create and communicate reports, strategies and industry insights about emerging technologies, products, services, methods and techniques and their potential impacts, threats, and opportunities.
- Keep the Head of Solution Architecture and the CTO management team informed and escalate where appropriate.
Requirements
- Experience in the Gen AI Orchestration frameworks such as Langchain, Autogen, Google ADK etc.
- Experience in designing data retrieval pipelines (RAG) with strong understanding of the vector databases.
- Expertise in AI services offered by any of the cloud providers AWS (e.g. bedrock), Azure (Azure AI Services) or GCP (Vertex AI).
- Experience in designing and evaluating Model Evaluation Services (MES) frameworks or designing "LLM-as-a-Judge" pipelines.
- Experience in Prompt Management - Strategic approach to prompt versioning, testing, and lifecycle management within production environment.
- Experience in designing and implementing AI Guardrail frameworks to mitigate risks associated with the prompt injection, hallucinations and biased outputs.
- Strong knowledge of Model Context Protocol (MCP) for standardising the integration between LLM and external data sources.
- Strong knowledge of integration security best practices.
- Experience with data exchange formats and transformation techniques.
- Experience in designing RESTFul APIs and Event-Driven Architectures.
- Experience of applying integration pattern and strong knowledge of architecture styles.
- Understanding of software delivery pipelines and how solution fits into CI/CD practices.
- Experience designing and deploying integration solutions within atleast one major cloud environments.
- Recognised expertise in Architecture, the technology involved, current developments, the most commonly available products, and the application of Architecture within a technical or business environment.
- Take innovative approaches to problem solving and/or devising inventive and creative solutions.
- Stakeholder management, ability to communicate at all levels to ensure business and technical objectives are met.
- Keep organisational objectives and strategies in mind and ensuring courses of action are aligned with the strategic context.
- Understand commercial considerations and ensure solutions reflect them when making decisions or recommending actions.
- Proactive approach, anticipating opportunities for improvement or development and taking appropriate action(s).
Desirable:
- Experience in MLOps.
- Experience in any of the cloud containerisation technologies e.g. AKS, GKE.
- Possess knowledge of Financial Services IT Architecture & Strategy.
- Previous experience operating in a heavily regulated environment including external regulated consumer products and service offerings.
- Current and emerging standards associated with IT practice nationally and internationally, published by authorities such as IEEE, IEC, BSI, ISO.
- Principles, methods, techniques and tools for the preparation and monitoring of budgets to manage costs and ensure cost-effectiveness and value for money., This is a Hybrid role and travel to Cardiff is required a minimum of 2 days a week. Welcome to our dynamic and forward-thinking team. We're looking for a proactive, highly organised, and adaptable
Benefits & conditions
We take pride in being a diverse and inclusive business. It's a place where you can Be You, and show up as you are. We're committed to fostering a people-first culture where everyone is accepted, supported, and empowered to be brilliant. You can, Grow And Progress at a pace and direction that suits you, Make A Difference for our customers and each other, and Share in Our Future with all colleagues eligible for up to £3,600 of free shares each year after one year of service.
Everyone receives 33 days holiday (including bank holidays) when they join us, increasing the longer you stay with us, up to a maximum of 38 days (including bank holidays). You also have the option to buy or sell up to an additional five days of annual leave.
We're proud of our people-first culture. In fact, we've been recognised as a Great Place to Work for Women, a Great Place to Work for Wellbeing, and an overall Great Place to Work for over 25 years! We're fully committed to making sure your progression is not slowed or halted by barriers related to race, gender, age, sexuality or any of the protected characteristics.
Our fantastic benefits make sure our colleagues have a great work-life balance; You can view some of our other key benefits here.
