Lead Solution Architect

Location: St James's

Entity:
Technology Job Family Group: IT&S Group

Job Description:

At bp, we are reimagining how our trading organisation uses technology to unlock new value, strengthen decision-making, and support a rapidly evolving energy landscape. As our Lead Solution Architect for Gas and Power Trading , you will guide the next generation of our trading platform one that is modern, scalable, and built to meet the real-time demands of global commodity markets. This is a high-impact role where deep domain expertise meets modern engineering, and where your architectural leadership will shape bps capability for years to come.

What you will do In this role, you will lead the end-to-end architecture of our bespoke energy trading solutions. We work closely with traders, product owners, market experts, and engineering teams, and you will bring these viewpoints together to create solutions that are both technically robust and aligned with business ambition. You will help us modernise our trading platform by applying contemporary design patterns, cloud-native engineering principles, and architectural thinking that supports performance, scalability, and future growth.

Throughout the delivery lifecycle, you will provide guidance, ensure alignment across internal and external teams, and champion technical excellence. You will also play a central part in re-designing trading capabilities across front-, middle-, and back-office workflows, ensuring that every component from deal capture to optimisation and reporting works seamlessly together. Key areas of focus include:
Architecture & Design You will lead architectural direction for our trading systems, documenting key decisions, making thoughtful trade-offs, and ensuring that every design reflects both functional needs and technical strategy. You will translate complex requirements into solutions that are scalable, maintainable, and ready for real-world trading conditions. Domain Expertise & Advisory We depend on your practical knowledge of physical Gas and/or Power trading.

You will act as a trusted advisor throughout delivery, supporting design reviews, guiding change initiatives, and helping our business teams understand how architecture decisions support their goals. Collaboration & Communication You will work closely with product owners, developers, designers, data engineers, vendor partners, and consultants. Because our trading platform touches so many teams, clear communication and strong coordination will be essential to ensure smooth progress and shared understanding.

Lifecycle Leadership & Operational Excellence You will apply strong knowledge of the energy trading lifecycle to ensure the solutions we build are robust, resilient, and ready for operational use. We follow Agile ways of working and promote Dev Ops and CI/CD practices values that you will help reinforce across teams. What you will need to be successful Required A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field.

Deep experience in physical Gas and/or Power trading, including contract optionality, optimisation, scheduling, and an understanding of full lifecycle trade processes. Strong knowledge of options modelling and dependency graph concepts. Hands-on experience designing modern trading systems using microservices, messaging, caching, and cloud-native patterns. Architecture & Engineering Skills Data Architecture:
You bring strong experience designing data models for both transactional and analytical systems, understand reconciliation processes, and are familiar with real-time reporting, distributed caching, and unstructured databases such as Mongo

DB. Technical Architecture:
You are confident with modern design patterns, AWS cloud services, C# or Java, containerisation (Kubernetes, Docker, Open Shift), and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform. Familiarity with React for UI development is highly valuable. Integration Expertise:
You understand real-time messaging such as AMQ, API design using JSON and Swagger, and batch processing methods commonly used in trading systems. Infrastructure & Dev Ops:
You understand CI/CD workflows, Git-based repositories,…