Lead Solution Architect

Join us as a Lead Solution Architect, where you’ll help shape and deliver data-driven solutions that support how we work and serve our clients. This role sits within the Corporate Architecture team and offers the chance to contribute to meaningful improvements in data innovation, data platforms and designing products & services that meet real customer needs. You’ll work closely with people across different teams to create secure, scalable solutions that support data insights, smooth operations, and better data products to meet consumer needs.

To succeed in this role, you’ll bring experience and skills such as:

• Demonstrated experience as a solution architect, including overseeing team performance and guiding technical delivery.
• Capability to manage a team of 10 Senior Solution Architects
• Working with data warehousing, data lakes, data mesh, and platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, and cloud-based data services (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Using machine learning frameworks, building models, and working with AI, business intelligence tools, and data visualisation platforms.
• Building and guiding ETL processes, data pipelines, and streaming systems, with a focus on data quality, metadata, and security.

Some other highly valued skills may include:

• Understanding data protection regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and how to handle personal and sensitive data responsibly.
• Knowing how data is used in the Global Transaction Banking space.
• Supporting decentralised, team-led approaches to working with data.

You may be assessed on skills that help you succeed in this role, such as awareness of risk and governance, adapting to change, understanding business needs, solving problems, and working with digital tools and technologies.

This role is based in Glasgow.

To design, develop, and implement solutions to complex business problems, collaborating with stakeholders to understand their needs and requirements, and design and implement solutions that meet those needs and create solutions that balance technology risks against business delivery, driving consistency.

• Design and development of solutions as products that can evolve, meeting business requirements that align with modern software engineering practices and automated delivery tooling. This includes identification and implementation of the technologies and platforms.
• Targeted design activities that apply an appropriate workload placement strategy and maximise the benefit of cloud capabilities such as elasticity, serverless, containerisation etc.
• Best practice designs incorporating security principles (such as defence in depth and reduction of blast radius) that meet the Bank’s resiliency expectations.
• Solutions that appropriately balance risks and controls to deliver the agreed business and technology value.
• Adoption of standardised solutions where they fit. If no standard solutions fit, feed into their ongoing evolution where appropriate.
• Fault finding and performance issues support to operational support teams, leveraging available tooling.
• Solution design impact assessment in terms of risk, capacity and cost impact, inc. estimation of project change and ongoing run costs.
• Development of the requisite architecture inputs required to comply with the banks governance processes, including design artefacts required for architecture, privacy, security and records management governance processes.

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures..
• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department’s future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements..
• If the position has leadership…