Engineering Architect

As our new Engineering Architect, you will own and evolve the technical foundations that underpin product and service delivery, including engineering standards, development frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, testing harnesses, observability, and operational practices.

Your focus will be on enabling a fast-moving, AI-first delivery team to consistently deliver high-quality, scalable, and supportable solutions without needing to rebuild core foundations for every delivery cycle.

In this varied role, you will:

• own and version technical foundations across all seven harness dimensions (Security, performance, coding style, UI/UX baselines, logging and observability, testing) so that every deliverable inherits secure, observable and tested defaults
• build and maintain the shared ADO CI/CD pipelines and release governance so that standards are enforced automatically, and DORA metrics are produced from the pipeline itself
• own the light-touch technical governance model - automated gates over committee review
• ensure observability is instrumented from the first commit through to live running so that everything the team ships can be operated and handed over to a receiving product team
• contribute hands-on as a full-stack builder inside each delivery's time box so that the harness stays credible and drift is caught in days rather than at cycle end
• own the design and hands-on running of the delivery stack end to end - application architecture, containerisation, virtualisation, networking and deployment topology - so that what the team builds can be stood up, scaled and supported in the Azure estate without external dependency
• shape deliveries as one of three leads, testing technical feasibility and setting the no-gos, so that committed work stays inside its appetite
• represent the team's technical position in assurance, security and enterprise architecture conversations
• proactively track industry trends, emerging tools and agentic engineering practice, and self-initiate the learning needed to apply them - trialling promising techniques and approaches in cooldown and sharing what works back into the harness, rules files and skills library.

We are looking for:

• deep, current full stack engineering capability with hands-on delivery in an Azure and Azure Dev Ops (ADO) ecosystem using infrastructure as code approaches
• strong practical coding experience in Python and JavaScript/Type Script, with the fluency to work across back-end services, front-end interfaces and automation scripting
• sound stack design judgement, with working knowledge of containerisation, virtualisation and networking sufficient to design, deploy and troubleshoot applications across Azure environments
• proven ownership of CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, release governance and DORA-based delivery measurement
• strong grounding in security (secret management, dependency and static analysis scanning, least-privilege IAM), observability (structured logging, tracing and metrics) and test and evaluation automation
• practical experience of AI-first, agentic delivery - rules files, known-good templates, curated skills libraries and evaluation harnesses for AI-generated output
• ability to codify standards as machine-readable scaffolding rather than documentation, and to balance light-touch governance against delivery speed
• credibility to represent the team's technical position with enterprise architecture, security and assurance functions
• experience designing and delivering production-grade AI software systems across different domains
• proven expertise in designing and/or implementing generative AI systems in production, including agentic systems, RAG pipelines, tool-use patterns, and model adaptation strategies
• practical experience in retrieval and knowledge systems
• breadth of knowledge across modern AI technologies, including generative models, deep learning, and predictive ML.

• A combined pension contribution of up to 20%.
• Career progression and professional development opportunities.
• 25 days' holiday rising to 28 with length of service.
• The opportunity to sell up to five days of holiday every year.
• The opportunity to buy up to ten days of holiday each year (subject to conditions).
• A healthcare package that allows you to claim back healthcare costs.
• Life assurance of up to eight times your salary.
• The opportunity to lease a new electric car through salary sacrifice (subject to conditions).
• Cashback and discounts from more than 3,000 retailers.
• One paid volunteering…