Enterprise Architect

Role Title: Enterprise Architect

Division: Technology

Location: Glasgow/ Liverpool/ London

Contract: Perm

Working pattern: Hybrid

About the Role

 The Enterprise Architect is a senior architecture role responsible for shaping enterprise technology direction and translating business strategy into coherent target, transitional and delivery architectures. The role works across business capabilities, programmes and technology domains to ensure change strengthens the enterprise estate rather than creating isolated solutions, avoidable complexity or long-term constraint.

The role is focused on enabling change: setting clear technology direction, making strategic choices, defining reusable standards and patterns, and helping teams move quickly within understood guardrails. It balances enterprise-wide thinking with pragmatic delivery, recognising where existing platforms should be enhanced, where capabilities should be reused or consolidated, and where new investment is genuinely required.

The role will suit an experienced architecture leader who can connect business outcomes, operating model, applications, data, integration, cloud, security and engineering practices, and who can influence senior stakeholders through clear choices, roadmaps and evidence-based trade-offs.

What you’ll be responsible for

• Own and evolve enterprise target and transitional architectures across business capabilities, applications, data, integration, infrastructure, cloud, security and engineering.
• Translate business and technology strategy into clear architectural priorities, strategic decisions and sequenced roadmaps that guide investment and delivery.
• Shape major programmes and cross-cutting initiatives from discovery onwards, ensuring workstreams contribute to a coherent end-to-end outcome rather than optimising individual silos.
• Assess when existing technology should be enhanced, reused, consolidated or retired, and identify where new capability or platform investment is required.
• Define and maintain enterprise technology principles, standards, reference architectures and approved patterns that teams can apply without repeated interpretation or review.
• Work with Engineering, Platform, Cloud, Data, Cyber Security and Service teams to shape strategic platforms, engineering toolchains, golden paths and automated guardrails that make compliant delivery easier.
• Clarify architectural ownership and decision boundaries across Enterprise Architecture, domain and solution architecture, engineering, platform teams, security and delivery.
• Drive rationalisation of duplicated capabilities, overlapping tools, inconsistent patterns and legacy technology, with explicit transition plans and accountable owners.
• Provide architectural leadership for decisions that span domains, programmes or organisational boundaries, including integration, data, identity, resilience, sourcing and operational ownership.
• Partner with business, product and technology leaders to develop capability-aligned roadmaps that connect near-term delivery to the longer-term enterprise direction.
• Guide vendor and platform evaluations using business fit, architectural alignment, interoperability, security, resilience, cost, portability and long-term maintainability.
• Use architecture governance proportionately, focusing design authority and assurance on material, novel, cross-cutting or long-lived decisions while enabling standard change to proceed through established patterns.
• Maintain decision records, architecture models and roadmaps so that approved direction, dependencies, constraints and transition states are visible and usable by delivery teams.
• Monitor technology, market and regulatory developments, assessing where emerging capabilities, including AI and automation, can create enterprise value within appropriate guardrails.

About you

If you meet some of these criteria and are excited about the role, we encourage you to apply

• Significant experience operating as an Enterprise Architect, Lead Architect or equivalent senior architecture role, ideally in regulated financial services or wealth management.
• Proven ability to shape target architectures and roadmaps across multiple business capabilities, programmes and technology domains.
• Broad knowledge across applications, data, integration, cloud, infrastructure, cyber security, service management and engineering practices.
• Strong understanding of operating models, capability-based planning, platform strategy, technology rationalisation and architectural transition planning.
• Ability to distinguish enterprise decisions from domain and solution decisions, and to apply architecture effort proportionately to materiality and risk.
• Experience defining practical standards, reusable patterns and guardrails that improve consistency and accelerate delivery.
• Ability to evaluate strategic options and communicate trade-offs clearly across value, cost, risk, complexity, resilience and time to market.
• Confident senior stakeholder influencer, able to align business, technology, risk and delivery leaders behind a clear direction without relying on formal authority.
• Strong written and visual communication skills, with the ability to turn complex architecture into concise decision material, roadmaps and executive narratives.
• Pragmatic judgement and a delivery mindset, maintaining strategic coherence while supporting incremental change and realistic transition states.
• Technical Skills & Engineering Requirements
• Strong understanding of modern application and platform architecture, including cloud-native, SaaS, API-led, event-driven and data-centric patterns.
• Good working knowledge of AWS and Azure architecture, including identity, networking, security, resilience, observability, cost and shared platform concerns.
• Strong understanding of enterprise integration, including APIs, events, messaging, managed file transfer, batch movement, data contracts and orchestration.
• Good appreciation of data architecture, governance, lineage, quality, analytical platforms and the implications of duplicated or fragmented data.
• Understanding of the Engineering SDLC and enterprise toolchain capabilities, including source control, CI/CD, automated testing, security scanning, artefact management, infrastructure as code, release management and operations.
• Experience shaping technology standards and approved patterns, with sufficient technical depth to challenge designs and ensure standards can be implemented and automated.
• Good understanding of operational resilience, service ownership, disaster recovery, monitoring, support models and non-functional requirements.
• Awareness of AI and automation architecture, including enterprise platforms, responsible AI controls, data protection, model lifecycle, human oversight and integration into business and engineering workflows.
• Ability to assess vendor and product architectures, including extensibility, interoperability, data portability, concentration risk, exit considerations and total lifecycle impact.
• Ability to produce and maintain architecture artefacts including capability maps, current and target-state views, transition architectures, reference architectures, roadmaps, decision records and dependency maps.
• Measures of Success
• Clear enterprise technology direction that is understood and used by programmes, product teams and engineering functions.
• Major change initiatives demonstrably align to target architecture while retaining pragmatic, deliverable transition states.
• Increased reuse of strategic platforms, standards and approved patterns, reducing repeated design effort and delivery friction.
• Fewer duplicated capabilities, fragmented tools and inconsistent technology choices, supported by an actionable rationalisation roadmap.
• Architecture engagement is earlier and more focused on shaping outcomes, with proportionate assurance reserved for material architectural decisions.
• Improved clarity of ownership for enterprise platforms, standards, architectural decisions and operational accountability.
• Roadmaps and architecture decisions enable investment prioritisation and reduce long-term complexity, technical debt and avoidable risk.
• Positive stakeholder confidence in Architecture as a practical partner that enables change as well as protecting enterprise coherence.