Technical Solutions Architect

Company: Zippd
Location: Manchester City Centre, UK (100% Onsite)
Job Type: Full-time
Visa Status: No sponsor ships available (Must have the right to work in the UK)

Zippd is a fast-moving, technology-first logistics platform. We are building the routing engines, warehouse management systems (WMS), and APIs that power the next generation of urban delivery.

We are looking for a hands‑on Technical Solutions Architect to act as the critical bridge between our operations, our clients, our engineering team, and our wider business. You will own the technical design of new features end‑to‑end — from gathering requirements with non‑technical stakeholders, through architecting the right solution against our existing platform, all the way to presenting it back to both the engineering team and senior leadership for sign‑off.

This is not a pure documentation role. You will be expected to have a programmer's instinct, an architect's eye for trade‑offs, and a consultant's ability to communicate. You'll also spend around 20% of your time acting as the technical face of Zippd, supporting our retail partners as they integrate into our API ecosystem.

Please Note: This is a strictly 100% onsite role based in our Manchester office.

• Translate business and operational requirements into robust, scalable technical solutions that fit cleanly into our existing platform.
• Design microservice architectures, API contracts, database schemas, and integration patterns that align with our engineering principles.
• Make pragmatic build vs buy vs integrate decisions, considering cost, time, and long‑term maintainability.
• Produce high‑quality sequence diagrams, Entity‑Relationship Diagrams (ERDs), system context diagrams, and API data flow charts.
• Write air‑tight technical specifications in Confluence so our engineering team (Laravel / MySQL / OSRM / AWS) knows exactly what to build without ambiguity.

• Run requirements sessions with non‑technical stakeholders — operations managers, commercial teams, the CEO, and the CTO.
• Convert ambiguous business problems into clearly scoped technical solutions.
• Present proposed solutions back to both the engineering team and senior leadership, defending the design and adapting based on feedback.
• Act as the trusted technical voice in the room when business and engineering disagree.

• Provide ongoing support to the engineering team throughout build — clarifying intent, answering questions, and unblocking decisions.
• Act as second‑line technical support for complex production issues, working alongside engineering to diagnose and resolve.

• Act as the technical point of contact for external retailers and partners onboarding onto the Zippd platform.
• Support clients in understanding and consuming our REST APIs and webhooks.
• Troubleshoot integration issues, test API payloads, and ensure a smooth technical handover before clients go into live production.

This role is for someone with real engineering DNA
— not a pure business analyst with diagramming skills. You must bring:

• Programming background: A previous career as a developer (Laravel/PHP, Python, Node.js, Go, or similar). You don't need to write production code daily here, but you must be able to read a pull request, sketch a working algorithm on a whiteboard, and have an opinion on code quality.
• Microservice architecture experience: Hands‑on experience designing or working in microservice ecosystems — service boundaries, inter‑service communication, event‑driven patterns, queue systems (Redis, SQS, RabbitMQ), and the trade‑offs vs monoliths.
• Database design: Strong SQL fundamentals. You can design a normalised relational schema from scratch, understand indexing strategies, and know when to break the rules (denormalisation, caching, read replicas). No
  
  SQL exposure is a plus.
• AWS experience: Practical knowledge of core AWS services — EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, Cloud Watch. You should be able to design a…