Application Architect

ROLE OVERVIEW

As an Application Architect (Band 7B) deployed to Client's Business Applications team, you will lead the technical direction for AI-first applications and internal platforms. You will own the full technical journey from solution architecture and engineering design through production delivery, adoption and continuous improvement.

A significant focus of this role is establishing and continuously improving the team's agentic engineering harness including development workflows, reusable patterns, testing, evaluation, observability, security controls and AI-assisted engineering practices.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own the architecture, design review, security posture, identity (AuthN/Z), technical delivery and support model of AI-first applications and internal platforms from discovery through production, adoption, support and continuous improvement.
• Establish and continuously improve the team's agentic engineering harness, including coding workflows, tool use, evaluation, testing, deployment, observability and operational guardrails.
• Define reusable engineering foundations for agentic applications, including service architecture, APIs, event contracts, data access, identity, permissions, auditability and human escalation paths.
• Lead the development of internal platforms that reduce reliance on third-party SaaS while meeting requirements for security, reliability, usability, scalability and cost efficiency.
• Build prototypes and critical-path production code to validate new ideas, resolve technical uncertainty and accelerate delivery.
• Set engineering standards for AI safety, privacy, security, reliability, evaluation, data governance, cost management and production operations.
• Provide technical leadership through design reviews, architecture decisions, implementation guidance, mentoring and engineering capability building.

ESSENTIAL SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years focused on designing and building scalable systems.
• Demonstrable experience designing and operating hardened, enterprise-grade applications, APIs, integrations and distributed systems.
• Track record of leading architecture and technical delivery across multiple teams or a broad technology domain.
• Strong experience with software quality, automated testing, observability, reliability, security and operational excellence.
• Ability to translate business and user problems into technical direction, and clearly explain trade-offs involving cost, quality, scalability and time to market.
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising engineering standards through reviews, documentation and knowledge sharing.
• Hands-on experience with agentic engineering tools (e.g. Cursor, Claude Code, Codex) and emerging AI technologies to enhance productivity and improve workflows.

DESIRABLE SKILLS

• Experience building internal enterprise applications, business platforms, service management tools or workflow automation solutions.
• Experience with SaaS replacement, platform migration or reducing vendor dependency.
• Experience designing AI-enabled applications or MCP-based system integrations.
• Experience with platformisation, reusable services or developer productivity tooling.
• Experience mentoring engineers across multiple locations or technical disciplines.