Bid Solution Architect

Join our team at Reed Professional Services, a leading Management Consultancy and technology services provider. We are currently seeking a Bid Solution Architect for a major public-sector bid project. This part-time, hybrid role is based in London and spans 5 months, requiring a commitment of 3 days per week.

Day-to-Day of the Role:

• Own and assure the end-to-end solution architecture for the bid submission.
• Produce and validate architectural artefacts including high-level and low-level diagrams, integration, deployment, and hosting models, and security architecture views.
• Ensure technical designs are scalable, supportable, secure, and contract-ready.
• Assure the full scheduling system architecture, focusing on performance and resilience.
• Validate integration assumptions, API patterns, data flows, and control mechanisms.
• Ensure system observability, failover, and peak-load behavior are credible and evidenced.
• Design or validate security controls across application, infrastructure, and operations.
• Ensure alignment of IAM, encryption, logging, and incident controls with bid commitments.
• Validate technical incident flows and recovery behavior.
• Test assumptions for resilience, failover, and service continuity.
• Validate that infrastructure, hosting, and software costs match the proposed design.
• Identify unfunded assumptions, delivery risks, or over-ambitious non-functional claims.
• Provide technical inputs for written bid responses, annexes, and clarifications.
• Support dialogue sessions with technical briefing packs and defensible response lines.

• Proven experience as a Solution Architect in complex, multi-supplier environments.
• Strong experience with scheduling, booking, appointment, or workforce allocation platforms.
• Deep expertise in integration architecture, including API-led and cross-supplier integration.
• Demonstrable experience producing architecture artefacts for public sector or regulated procurements.
• Prior involvement in bid responses, competitive tenders, or dialogue-based procurements.
• Strong knowledge of cloud architecture, resilience, scalability, and deployment models.
• Strong understanding of security architecture, including IAM, logging, encryption, and assurance.
• Excellent written skills, with the ability to produce clear, evidence-led technical bid content.
• Confident stakeholder management skills, able to challenge suppliers and align technical and commercial teams.

Desirable:

• Experience with high-volume booking or scheduling platforms in sectors such as transport, testing and inspection, field services, or healthcare.
• Familiarity with Microsoft-centric environments, including Azure, Entra ID, and MFA.
• Experience supporting UK government procurement dialogue processes.
• Knowledge of operational data handling, auditability, and evidential traceability.
• Experience validating AI or automation capabilities within controlled governance frameworks.