Lead Solutions Architect

We're on the hunt for a Lead Solutions Architect who skilfully blends both a safe pair of hands and a futurist's perspective. Someone energised by change, fluent in complexity, and motivated by the challenge of shaping a bank that's built not just for today - but for the decades ahead.

This isn't a "keep the lights on" architecture role. It's about setting direction, unlocking innovation, and orchestrating complex, high impact architectures that define how we serve colleagues and customers through our next chapter of digital evolution.

As a Lead Solutions Architect, you'll play a pivotal role in designing and shaping how the Colleague Lab, part of the Colleague & Customer Services Platform, delivers transformative experiences across our colleague-facing and direct-to-consumer channels. You'll help us build modern, scalable, AI-enabled journeys that feel effortless for customers, and relevant for the business.

You'll bring the thought leadership to imagine what's possible, the technical credibility to make it real, and the relationship building strength to bring others with you.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

You'll operate at the heart of the Customer & Colleague Services Platform, within the Insurance, Pensions & Investments division of Scottish Widows, partnering closely with Product Owners, Engineering Teams and Enterprise Architecture. Your influence will guide several multi-functional feature teams, located across Edinburgh, Leeds, Bristol and Hyderabad - helping them balance delivery pace with strategic architectural vision.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Defining Target Solution Architectures for APIs & microservices, CCaaS telephony, colleague tooling, robotics and AI powered automation, agentic, and much more

• Designing how AI can amplify what we do - not as hype, but as thoughtful, responsible, value creating capability (Nice to Have)

• Simplifying and modernising our service driven architecture, so we can scale, digitise and differentiate at pace (Key)

• Defining and crafting the Platform's data strategy for scaled actionable intelligence (Key)

• Working with teams to modernise and optimise our back-office operations and efficiency

We're evolving our technology landscape to be more resilient, more adaptive, and more human-centred. You'll be a key architect of that journey.

You'll excel here if you combine architectural depth, strategic clarity, and an ability to excite and inspire through storytelling. Specifically, we're looking for:

• Experience leading complex change across multiple interdependent systems

• Deep knowledge of web and API architectures - microservices, CQRS, publish subscribe, and event-subscribe, and event-driven patterns

• Experience designing for security, reliability and scale

• Strong understanding of authentication/single sign on (OAuth) and encryption (in transit and at-rest)

• Hands-on experience defining patterns, standards and practices

Nice to have

• Cloud platform experience (GCP preferred, Azure or AWS also valuable)

• Telephony / CCaaS experience (Genesys Cloud preferred, AWS, NICE also valuable)

• Leadership of other architects

• Ability to prototype innovative approaches using any tech stack

• Experience with content management frameworks and tooling

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.

About working for us

Our focus is to ensure we're inclusive every day, building an organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity in all its forms. We want our people to feel that they belong and can be their best, regardless of background, identity or culture. 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. And it's why we especially welcome applications from under-represented groups. We're disability confident. So if you'd like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know

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

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%

• An annual performance-related bonus

• 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