Senior Solutions Architect

Nottingham Trent House (95002), United Kingdom, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire

Senior Solutions Architect

About the role

It’s an exciting time at Capital One UK!

We’re on a mission to create a cloud-native architecture which will enable us to increase financial inclusion through delivering highly resilient, transformative, real time and intelligent experiences to our customers.

Capital One’s Architecture team works closely with business and Enterprise partners to define strategic destinations for our business and architecture domains, including making key investment and buy-vs-build and Enterprise platform reuse recommendations to achieve the target business capabilities. 

We also work closely with delivery teams, guiding and governing complex solutions to balance speed and agility with delivery quality, confidence and auditability.  Pragmatism is key to understanding and making the right judgement calls across the constraints that our delivery teams operate under.

As a Senior Manager Solutions Architect you are an experienced technical leader bringing business, industry and deep technical understanding to shape the architecture direction and evolution of the UK ecosystem across your aligned architecture domain(s) and business outcomes. You will actively contribute to promoting and advancing architecture excellence across the team, and foster innovation to unlock value across our business.

Come and join us to shape the future of financial services in the Cloud.

What you’ll do

• Be a trusted part of the technical leadership of your aligned business outcome team, as well as an active participant in the broader Architecture community, with wider context, influence and ownership of the long term target architecture for your technology domain.
• Collaborate with product managers and business sponsors on the overall product roadmap for key business goals, extending the technology planning horizon in order to deliver desired business capabilities.
• Play the leading technical role in larger initiatives within your outcome or technical area of expertise, partnering with Product to shape the solutions and breaking down complex problems for agile teams to deliver.
• Ensure that solutions in your outcome team deliver value to the business and are resilient, scalable, well managed, performant and cost-effective through close collaboration with peers across Product, Service Transition, Cyber security and Engineering.  Set appropriate guardrails to enable our engineers to create applications aligned to our Enterprise objectives.
• Drive simplification across our architecture, processes and technologies, by encouraging and fostering the reuse of appropriate industry SaaS Solutions and/or Enterprise Standards, Patterns, Capabilities and Platforms.  Be a change agent driving continuous improvement in architecture process methodology and best-practices.
• Blend vision and perfection with pragmatism and realism to help navigate through trade-offs, typically involving time, cost, quality, scope and risk.
• Highlight the engineering skills needed to allow us to move towards our target technology architecture, and support the career growth of engineers in the domain of solution architecture and design.
• Foster a culture of knowledge sharing by acting as a thought catalyst by keeping the community up to date on industry, enterprise and business trends. Inject this context into technology decisions.
• Make everyone welcome and seek different perspectives; model inclusion.

 What we’re looking for:

• You have experience in solutions architecture in an environment of an internal/external IT technology estate and in-house, third party and SaaS delivery capabilities.  Further experience of operating within and influencing an Enterprise governance model is welcomed.
• Prior experience in real-time / event driven architectures
• You are skilled and knowledgeable across architectural areas compromising software applications, infrastructure and management information domains.  Experience of delivering solutions on Public Cloud is beneficial, particularly AWS.
• You are comfortable in reaching technical trade-offs between short-term team and long-term business needs and can tell the story to enable stakeholders to understand the rationale and implications.
• You are willing and excited to get into the detail of a data-driven, highly regulated industry with a degree of complexity, recognising that this inevitably results in necessary processes and constraints that can increase time to market over less regulated industries.  Experience in a Financial Services organisation is beneficial.
• You work well with diverse teams across multiple locations and geographies, partnering across the UK business and wider Enterprise to navigate an ambiguous and quickly changing environment.
• You are flexible, adapting your approach to meet the needs of the team, initiative, or product. You solicit differing views and are willing to change your mind and perspective as you learn more. You are adept at building consensus to align stakeholders to a common direction.

Where and how you'll work

This is a permanent position and can be based in either our London or Nottingham office.  

We're big on collaboration and connection, and so you will be based in our offices on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

What’s in it for you

• Bring us all this - and you’ll be well rewarded with a role contributing to the roadmap of an organisation committed to transformation
• We offer high performers strong and diverse career progression, investing heavily in developing great people through our Capital One University training programmes (and appropriate external providers)
• Immediate access to our core benefits including pension scheme, bonus, generous holiday entitlement and private medical insurance – with flexible benefits available including season-ticket loans, cycle to work scheme and enhanced parental leave
• Open-plan workspaces and accessible facilities designed to inspire and support you. Our Nottingham head-office has a fully-serviced gym, subsidised restaurant, mindfulness and music rooms.

What you should know about how we recruit

We pride ourselves on hiring the best people, not the same people. Building diverse and inclusive teams is the right thing to do and the smart thing to do. We want to work with top talent: whoever you are, whatever you look like, wherever you come from. We know it’s about what you do, not just what you say. That’s why we make our recruitment process fair and accessible. And we offer benefits that attract people at all ages and stages.

We also partner with organisations including the Women in Finance and Race At Work Charters, Stonewall and upReach to find people from every walk of life and help them thrive with us. We have a whole host of internal networks and support groups you could be involved in, to name a few:

• REACH – Race Equality and Culture Heritage group focuses on representation, retention and engagement for associates from minority ethnic groups and allies
• OutFront – to provide LGBTQ+ support for all associates
• Mind Your Mind – signposting support and promoting positive mental wellbeing for all
• Women in Tech – promoting an inclusive environment in tech
• EmpowHER - network of female associates and allies focusing on developing future leaders, particularly for female talent in our industry

Capital One is committed to diversity in the workplace.

If you require a reasonable adjustment, please contact ukrecruitment@capitalone.com  All information will be kept confidential and will only be used for the purpose of applying a reasonable adjustment.

Who We Are

At Capital One, we're building a leading information-based technology company. Still founder-led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Richard Fairbank, Capital One is on a mission to help our customers succeed by bringing ingenuity, simplicity, and humanity to banking. We measure our efforts by the success our customers enjoy and the advocacy they exhibit. We are succeeding because they are succeeding.

Guided by our shared values, we thrive in an environment where collaboration and openness are valued. We believe that innovation is powered by perspective and that teamwork and respect for each other lead to superior results. We elevate each other and obsess about doing the right thing. Our associates serve with humility and a deep respect for their responsibility in helping our customers achieve their goals and realize their dreams. Together, we are on a quest to change banking for good.