Solution Architect (Contract Role)
$800–$950 year
On-siteLondon, England, United Kingdom
Job Summary
Design secure, scalable, cloud-native solutions on Microsoft Azure spanning infrastructure, PaaS, networking, identity, security, and observability. Architect performant data pipelines, models, and governance for large volumes of reinsurance, placement, exposure, and claims data. Define and govern third-party integrations using API-first, event-driven patterns with canonical data models and anti-corruption layers. Embed zero-trust security principles, authentication, and compliance into designs from the outset. Produce high-quality solution designs, integration contracts, and architecture artefacts for the Architecture Review Board. Take a hands-on role in building proofs of concept to validate designs and support technical decisions. Promote the adoption of AI-assisted engineering tools across the delivery lifecycle. Work closely with business stakeholders and strategic delivery partners to shape greenfield initiatives.
Required Qualifications
- Extensive experience, grounded in hands-on software engineering and progressing into solution architecture over the last 4+ years
- Designed data-intensive systems you also helped build
- Ideally in insurance, reinsurance or wider financial services
- Current, practical programming skills, ideally in C#/.NET or Python
- Strong SQL
- Working knowledge of modern UI frameworks such as React or Angular with TypeScript
- Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and AzureDevops
- Comfortable writing production-quality code for proofs of concept and pairing with engineers
- Deep expertise in Azure infrastructure and platform services, including networking, security, identity, compute and integration services
- Hands-on experience of CI/CD tooling such as Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions
- Depth across architectural patterns such as microservices, event-driven, API-led, lakehouse/medallion and domain-driven design
- Good judgement on when to apply each architectural pattern
- Strong track record architecting data-intensive solutions handling large data volumes
- Experience across cloud data platforms, data pipelines and SQL-based technologies
- Strong integration experience across external systems, including REST APIs, messaging and event-driven architectures
- Experience using canonical data models and anti-corruption layers
- Strong grounding in security architecture, including authentication and authorisation patterns (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, Microsoft Entra ID, RBAC)
- Zero-trust principles
- Designing for compliance in regulated financial services (data privacy, cross-border data residency and audit requirements)
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate complex business requirements into pragmatic technical designs and to influence stakeholders at all levels
Desired Qualifications
- Experience designing agentic or AI-enabled solutions, including patterns such as retrieval-augmented generation, tool and API integration, evaluation and human-in-the-loop design
- Familiarity with AI-assisted engineering tools such as Claude Code or Claude Cowork
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