Lead Architect

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This range is provided by Williams Lea. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Salary: £120,000 per annum, plus company benefits

Location:

Remote (must be based in the UK)

Contract:

Full Time, Permanent

Shifts:

37.5 hours per week, Monday – Friday, 8:30am until 5pm with 1 hour unpaid lunch break

Work model:
Fully remote

Williams Lea seeks a Lead Architect to join our team!

Williams Lea is the leading global provider of skilled, technology-enabled, business-critical support services, with long-term trusted relationships with blue‑chip clients across investment banks, law firms and professional services firms. Williams Lea employees, nearly 7000 people worldwide, provide efficient business services at client sites in often complex and highly regulated environments, from centralised Williams Lea onshore facilities, and through best cost company offshore locations.

Purpose of role

As Lead Architect, you will be the technical thought leader responsible for defining and driving our enterprise platform architecture strategy. You’ll design and govern our cloud‑agnostic, security‑first infrastructure that supports autonomous AI agents, complex integrations, and stringent regulatory requirements. This is a hands‑on leadership role where you’ll balance strategic vision with practical implementation, ensuring our architecture scales elegantly across multi‑cloud environments while maintaining the trust of our enterprise clients.

You’ll work at the intersection of cutting‑edge AI technology and enterprise security, enabling our platform to deliver innovative agentic AI capabilities within the constraints of SOC2, ISO
27001, and industry‑specific compliance frameworks.

• Establish and evolve the enterprise platform architecture strategy, ensuring alignment with business objectives and regulatory requirements
• Represent the company’s technical capabilities to enterprise clients, partners, and at industry events; publish technical content and contribute to architectural standards
• Drive cloud‑agnostic design principles across AWS and Azure, ensuring portability and optimization for different deployment tiers
• Establish and enforce technical standards, design patterns, and best practices across all engineering teams
• Own major architectural decisions affecting platform scalability, security, performance, and compliance

• Architect scalable infrastructure for autonomous AI agents, including orchestration, communication protocols, and execution environments
• Implement Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent‑to‑Agent (A2A) standards, ensuring interoperability and secure agent communication
• Design abstraction layers for multiple LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock), enabling flexible model selection and cost optimisation
• Establish frameworks for AI safety, ethics, model monitoring, and regulatory compliance specific to AI systems

• Embed security controls at every architectural layer, implementing zero‑trust principles and defense‑in‑depth strategies
• Architect solutions meeting SOC2, ISO
  27001, GDPR, amongst others
• Design data residency and processing controls for multi‑region deployments and client‑specific compliance requirements
• Establish comprehensive logging, monitoring, and audit trail capabilities across all deployment tiers
• Define service boundaries, API contracts, and integration patterns for loosely coupled, independently deployable services
• Design secure tenant isolation for SaaS deployments while enabling single‑tenant options for enterprise clients
• Architect for high availability (99.9%+ uptime), low latency (