Senior Solutions Architect - Financial Services

Internal use only – Grade D

We are The Very Group and we’re here to help families get more out of life. We know that our customers work hard for their families and have a lot to balance in their busy lives. That’s why we combine amazing brands and products with flexible payment options on  to help them say yes to the things they love. We’re just as passionate about helping our people get more out of life too;

building careers with real growth, a sense of purpose, belonging and wellbeing.

The Financial Services (FS) Performance Unit is responsible for designing, building, changing and running technology across all our financial products and functions. It supports Account Management, Credit Risk, Fraud, Debt Management, Customer Payments, Insurance and Retail Credit Products, and will help drive future expansion into new FS products including Personal Loans.

Tech Stack:

Java, ECS, AWS RDS, Terraform, AWS API Gateway

As Senior Solution Architect you are expected to help shape architectural design and technology roadmaps for complex applications supporting high volume, mission critical products and services.

Responsible for designing solutions across the Financial Services tribe that meet both the functional and non-functional requirements for initiatives. Solutions will be a combination of custom-built software, utilising primarily AWS, and external providers’ SAAS components.

A key requirement for the role is the ability to analyse existing implementations, sometimes including legacy systems, and present options (Key Design Decisions) showing the strategic option (if known) plus other options which are pragmatic roadmap phases balancing long-term strategy and shorter-term business value. A benefit for this role will be strong system analysis skills.

Defining roadmaps for the domains which define the as-is and to-be architectural states and the proposed transitionary phases to be followed to achieve the proposed target state. Roadmap phases will balance strategic direction with business delivery.

Working with the Lead Architect, you will be responsible for implementing the policies and standards that guide technology delivery, possessing significant experience in modern, cloud-based technology standards and practices.

Assessing 3rd party providers to ensure the proposed solution meets the TVG standards for security, privacy, data integration, performance and reliability.

You will be experienced in actively addressing the most complicated risks, issues and dependencies including managing dependencies where ownership exists outside of the team. We need the right person to help identify innovative ways to unblock issues whilst evolving our architecture towards a defined target.

The Senior solution architect must both contribute towards strategic thinking as well as ensuring that appropriate technology standards are created and adhered to – including solution designs, strategic alignment, growing technology capabilities, introducing best practice and leading technology selection. The Senior Solution Architect must be an integral part of the Solution Architecture team, working in collaboration with the Lead Architect within a Tribe.

You’ll work hand in hand with our Product Managers, Delivery and Technical Leads in order to influence and define a technology roadmap to meet both our commercial and technology aims.

We’re looking for a role model within the discipline to engage the wider community whilst coaching/mentoring other architects, technical leads and engineers.

To be successful in the role, we need someone who can mediate between people and explain complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences, particularly someone who is confident communicating with stakeholders at all levels. Someone who understands the evolutionary nature of technology delivery in an agile environment. As you may imagine, our stakeholder expectations are high, and we’ll need you to facilitate discussions about high risk and complexity even within constrained timescales.

We want to be known as the best in class for this space, so here you can speak and represent the community to large…