Portfolio Architect

9 Month Fixed Term Contract

Canada Life UK looks after the retirement, investment and protection needs of individuals, families and companies. We help to build better futures for our customers, our intermediaries and our employees by operating as a modern, agile and welcoming organisation.

Part of our parent company Great-West Lifeco, Canada Life UK has operated in the United Kingdom since 1903. We have hundreds of respected and supported employees committed to doing the right thing for our customers and colleagues.

Canada Life UK is transforming to create a more customer‑focused business by providing our customers with expertise on financial and tax planning, offering home finance and annuities propositions, and providing collective fund solutions to third‑party customers.

Are you a visionary with deep data and technology skills in cloud and modern architectures? Do you have a strong business understanding, ideally in the financial services industry? Are you experienced in defining data strategies and leading architectural transformations that support customer‑centricity, digital experience and data‑driven decision‑making whilst fostering agility, scalability, and compliance? If so, we want you to join our team.

As the Portfolio Architect provides strategic architectural leadership across the IT portfolio, ensuring that technology investment, solution design, and delivery are aligned to enterprise strategy, financial plans, and architectural standards. The role integrates architectural vision with financial insight—informing multiyear planning, modelling cost impacts, and shaping investment decisions to maximise value and sustainability. Reporting to the Head of Architecture and Strategy, you will collaborate with senior IT leaders, key business stakeholders, and architects to make aligned pragmatic, commercially driven decisions that satisfy business objectives.

You will be accountable for the development and delivery of key portfolio architecture capabilities, joining architecture roadmaps and strategies across the enterprise.

• Own the architectural roadmap planning (‘runway’) and capability evolution for the overall IT portfolio
• Integrates architecture and financial insight into coherent, long‑term portfolio direction
• Ensure all initiatives across the portfolio meet architectural principles, have clear business outcomes, and consider compliance requirements and financial planning constraints
• Provide input into architecture governance, design assurance, and decision support across programmes and domains
• Promote shared services, common platforms, reusability, and cost‑effective architectural practice
• Ensure that technology assets are managed responsibly, with sight of cost profiles, endoflife risks, and modernisation needs
• Guides teams in making financially sustainable architectural decision
• Develop financial models for technology investments across short‑, medium‑, and longterm timelines
• Analyse TCO, ROI, cost trajectories, depreciation cycles, and commercial impacts of architectural decisions
• Provide financial input into annual planning, multi‑year investment scenarios, budget cycles, and forecasting
• Partner with Finance to validate assumptions, align financial projections, and support business case development
• Works closely with delivery leads, product owners, Finance teams, and business stakeholders to ensure coherent, sustainable change
• Shapes decisions involving cost, value, and architectural risk across diverse stakeholder groups
• Shapes demand, evaluate feasibility, and ensure prioritisation decisions are informed by both architectural value and financial impact
• Identifies technology, financial, and strategic risks, ensuring decision‑makers understand cost and value implications
• Makes evidence‑based recommendations balancing cost, value, risk, and strategic alignment

• Highly Skilled in communicating complex architectural and financial trade‑offs to senior non‑technical stakeholders, can engage effectively with technology specialists and business stakeholders alike, is able to adjust communications style to fit the relevant audience and can respond to…