Solutions Architect
Ref: 26538, London, United Kingdom
Full Time
Project Management
Experienced
About Us
Ascent has recently been acquired by Acuity Analytics. This is both a significant milestone for us and a tremendous opportunity for you.
Acuity Analytics is a business with a strong global reputation, an impressive client base, and ambitious growth plans. We deliver deep insights and domain-led digital transformation to high-growth and heavily regulated organisations. To our customers, we bring a partnership that provides the talent, technology, and capability to enhance performance and operational efficiency.
As part of our continued growth, we are looking for a Solutions Architect to define enterprise-grade application solution architecture for large-scale legacy modernization initiatives within a Banking & Capital Markets environment.
About the Role
You will be responsible for assessing complex existing application and integration landscapes, particularly Microsoft technology-based estates, identifying modernization opportunities, and designing scalable, resilient, secure, maintainable and cloud-agnostic target solutions aligned to business capabilities and enterprise architecture standards.
You will bring strong functional understanding and technical depth to translate business workflows, operating processes, integration dependencies, data flows, control points, reporting requirements and non-functional needs into practical modernization blueprints. The role involves defining migration-ready architecture patterns across .NET, C#, Microsoft SQL Server, Azure and related Microsoft-based technologies, evaluating technology options, guiding engineering teams, and ensuring solutions address scalability, availability, disaster recovery, RPO/RTO, security, auditability, observability, operational resilience and long-term supportability.
Skills and Experience Required
Core Skills (must-have):
Nice to Have:
Key Competencies:
Certifications (Preferred):
What You Will Do
At Acuity Analytics, you'll have the opportunity to work across complex enterprise Azure environments while helping shape and improve our Managed Services capability.
You'll solve challenging technical problems, influence standards and automation, mentor other engineers, and work closely with customers and technical teams.
People are at the Heart of our Business. By investing in people, we achieve exceptional results for our clients and create new opportunities for our teams to thrive.
Check out this page for more details.
For more details about Acuity Analytics please see here: Read here.
Ascent has recently been acquired by Acuity Analytics. This is both a significant milestone for us and a tremendous opportunity for you.
Acuity Analytics is a business with a strong global reputation, an impressive client base, and ambitious growth plans. We deliver deep insights and domain-led digital transformation to high-growth and heavily regulated organisations. To our customers, we bring a partnership that provides the talent, technology, and capability to enhance performance and operational efficiency.
As part of our continued growth, we are looking for a Solutions Architect to define enterprise-grade application solution architecture for large-scale legacy modernization initiatives within a Banking & Capital Markets environment.
About the Role
You will be responsible for assessing complex existing application and integration landscapes, particularly Microsoft technology-based estates, identifying modernization opportunities, and designing scalable, resilient, secure, maintainable and cloud-agnostic target solutions aligned to business capabilities and enterprise architecture standards.
You will bring strong functional understanding and technical depth to translate business workflows, operating processes, integration dependencies, data flows, control points, reporting requirements and non-functional needs into practical modernization blueprints. The role involves defining migration-ready architecture patterns across .NET, C#, Microsoft SQL Server, Azure and related Microsoft-based technologies, evaluating technology options, guiding engineering teams, and ensuring solutions address scalability, availability, disaster recovery, RPO/RTO, security, auditability, observability, operational resilience and long-term supportability.
Skills and Experience Required
Core Skills (must-have):
- Enterprise Solution Architecture
- Application Legacy Modernization
- Cloud-Agnostic Architecture
- Microservices
- Kafka / Event-Driven Architecture
- Kubernetes
- API & Integration Modernization
- HA/DR design
- DevSecOps / GitOps
Nice to Have:
- Financial Services / Capital Markets domain experience
- DORA / operational resilience awareness
Key Competencies:
- Strong enterprise solution architecture experience in large-scale legacy modernization, application transformation, distributed systems, financial services platforms or high-volume transaction processing environments.
- Ability to assess legacy estates including monolithic applications, tightly coupled integrations, shared databases, batch workflows, reporting platforms, operational bottlenecks and technology obsolescence risks.
- Ability to understand business capabilities, functional workflows, operating models, reporting needs, controls, data dependencies and user journeys, and translate them into executable modernization solutions.
- Deep understanding of microservices, domain-driven design, API design, database-per-service, event-driven architecture, asynchronous messaging and enterprise integration design patterns.
- Hands-on knowledge of Kafka or equivalent event streaming platforms, IBM MQ, REST, gRPC, FIX, SFTP, schema registry, message transformation, replayability, retry, exception handling and reconciliation patterns.
- Strong experience with Kubernetes, Docker, container orchestration, cloud-native deployment, CI/CD, GitOps, Terraform, secrets management and DevSecOps engineering practices.
- Good working knowledge of Azure and/or GCP cloud services, cloud landing zones, networking, identity, security, observability, resilience and workload deployment patterns.
- Hands-on exposure to Azure architecture and Microsoft-based modernization patterns, including App Services, AKS, Azure SQL or SQL Server modernization, Entra ID, Key Vault, Azure Monitor and secure enterprise deployment practices.
- Knowledge of cloud-agnostic architecture principles, multi-cloud deployment considerations, workload portability, exit strategy, high availability, disaster recovery, RPO/RTO definition and cross-environment resilience patterns.
- Working knowledge of enterprise data platform concepts such as batch and streaming data flows, data quality, metadata, lineage, governance and regulatory data controls will be an advantage.
- Strong understanding of Microsoft application landscapes including .NET, C#, WPF, Microsoft SQL Server, stored procedures, SSIS/SSRS awareness, Azure services, PostgreSQL, Redis, relational modelling, reporting platforms and approaches for modernizing legacy enterprise applications.
- Experience defining migration approaches such as strangler pattern, phased cutover, parallel run, dual operation, output reconciliation, rollback design, hyper-care and legacy decommissioning.
- Ability to evaluate trade-offs across business value, functional fit, technology choices, portability, performance, resilience, security, operational complexity, cost and regulatory or audit expectations.
- Experience defining non-functional requirements, performance baselines, availability models, disaster recovery approaches, observability KPIs, operational runbooks and support models.
- Ability to communicate effectively with business stakeholders, product owners, operations users, engineering teams, senior stakeholders and client technology teams.
- Financial services, capital markets, trade lifecycle, risk, regulatory reporting, data warehouse modernization or operational resilience exposure will be an advantage.
Certifications (Preferred):
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
- Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect
- TOGAF® Enterprise Architecture Practitioner
What You Will Do
- Lead enterprise solution architecture for legacy modernization initiatives covering business capabilities, application architecture, integration, data, cloud, security, DevSecOps, observability and operational supportability.
- Assess existing application portfolios, monolithic platforms, shared databases, batch processing flows, integration dependencies, reporting workloads and operational constraints to define modernization priorities and solution options.
- Understand business processes, user journeys, data flows, upstream/downstream dependencies, reporting needs, control requirements and operational pain points to shape fit-for-purpose enterprise solution designs.
- Translate functional and non-functional requirements into modernization roadmaps, architecture decisions, solution blueprints, integration patterns, service boundaries, data models, deployment views and implementation guidance.
- Architect enterprise-grade application solutions using microservices, domain-aligned service design, API-first integration, event-driven workflows, service-owned databases and containerized runtime models.
- Design enterprise integration solutions using Kafka, IBM MQ, REST APIs, gRPC, FIX, SFTP, schema registry, canonical events, adapters, retries, idempotency, dead-letter handling and reconciliation patterns.
- Architect cloud-native and platform-agnostic solutions using Kubernetes, Docker, OpenShift, AKS/GKE or equivalent platforms, with appropriate runtime, networking, secrets, identity, deployment and portability considerations.
- Provide Azure-focused architecture guidance including Azure landing zones, compute, networking, identity, security, monitoring, deployment, integration and migration patterns for enterprise application modernization.
- Provide architecture guidance for application-facing data needs including data access patterns, reporting integrations, data contracts, auditability, lineage awareness and alignment with enterprise data platforms.
- Define and review technical designs involving .NET, C#, WPF, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Redis, middleware, reporting platforms, stored procedures and modernization of legacy Microsoft-based enterprise applications.
- Assess and document non-functional requirements including performance, scalability, latency, availability, resilience, disaster recovery, failover, security, auditability, monitoring and operational support.
- Define high availability and disaster recovery architecture including active-active or active-passive patterns, failover design, backup and restore strategy, cross-region or cross-cloud resilience, RPO/RTO targets and business continuity considerations.
- Support phased modernization planning including strangler pattern, coexistence with legacy systems, parallel run, data reconciliation, cutover readiness, rollback planning, risk mitigation and legacy decommissioning considerations.
- Facilitate solution discussions with business, product, operations, risk, compliance, data, infrastructure, security, DevOps, QA and client technology stakeholders to align scope, priorities, dependencies and delivery outcomes.
- Create architecture artifacts such as current-state assessments, high-level designs, target-state blueprints, interface specifications, sequence flows, deployment views, data flow diagrams, technology decision records and architecture summaries.
- Work with engineering teams to ensure solution designs are implementable, testable, observable, secure, migration-ready and aligned with enterprise architecture standards.
At Acuity Analytics, you'll have the opportunity to work across complex enterprise Azure environments while helping shape and improve our Managed Services capability.
You'll solve challenging technical problems, influence standards and automation, mentor other engineers, and work closely with customers and technical teams.
People are at the Heart of our Business. By investing in people, we achieve exceptional results for our clients and create new opportunities for our teams to thrive.
Check out this page for more details.
For more details about Acuity Analytics please see here: Read here.
If you have any questions contact our Talent Acquisition team on ta.admin@acuityanalytics.
For more details about Acuity Analytics please see here: Read here.
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