Solutions Architect

• We’re looking for an experienced Solutions Architect to join our London team
• You’ll design large-scale, data-intensive platforms and intelligent systems for ambitious enterprise clients, working on hard problems: real-time systems operating at significant scale, complex integration landscapes, and platforms where data and machine learning drive customer-facing outcomes
• This is a hands-on architecture role embedded in an established delivery team
• You’ll own solution designs end-to-end: shaping how new capabilities are architected, producing clear design documentation, and working with engineers, product managers, and client stakeholders to carry those designs through to production
• This is a client-facing role
• You’ll spend much of your time working inside the client’s organisation, alongside their architects, governance functions, business owners, and third-party vendors as well as our own delivery team
• That takes someone who can win trust quickly, build consensus across groups with competing priorities, and push back when it matters
• Design solutions across large-scale enterprise platforms: APIs, integrations, data flows, and the supporting cloud infrastructure
• Translate ambiguous business requirements into well-documented architectures that engineering teams can build from
• Present and defend designs with senior client stakeholders, including enterprise architects, programme leadership, and business owners
• Work within client governance processes such as architecture review boards, security reviews, and integration standards
• Collaborate day to day with engineers, data scientists, and product managers in an Agile delivery model
• Balance strategic direction with pragmatic delivery, judging when to invest in long-term design and when to ship
• Contribute to the wider architecture practice at Simple Machines through standards, reusable patterns, and ways of working
• You’ll join a high-performing, multi-disciplinary team delivering a large-scale machine learning platform for a global telecommunications client. The team operates with high autonomy and shared ownership, and works in a hybrid setup with both remote and in-person collaboration with client stakeholders

Benefits

• Employee assistance programme
• Generous parental leave: Three months’ fully paid primary carer leave and one month fully paid secondary carer leave, subject to a minimum 12 month tenure
• Flexible working: Want to work from home or leave early to pick up the kids? Need to start early some days, later on others? No problem!
• “Your day”: One day per year, in addition to annual leave days that you can take off with no explanation required
• Upskill - Learning and development: We all love continually learning and have a generous budget for you to upskill, join conferences, get certified and qualified

Preferred experience

• Sound judgement on trade-offs across cost, risk, delivery speed, and long-term maintainability
• Strong grounding in distributed systems, API design, and integration architecture
• A consultancy background, or experience that closely resembles one: client-facing delivery, multiple engagements or programmes, and comfort operating inside someone else’s organisation
• Strong grounding in data processing, data warehousing, sql, no sql, data pipelines
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including clear and well-structured design documentation
• A proven track record of managing complex stakeholder landscapes, aligning technical and business audiences with competing priorities
• Significant experience as a Solutions Architect on large-scale enterprise platforms, with designs you have taken from concept through to production
• A software engineering background, able to discuss details and technicalities with the engineering team to bring solutions to life grounded in the capabilities and constraints of the projects
• Experience architecting cloud-native platforms on a major public cloud
• Understanding of containerised and orchestrated deployments (Docker, Kubernetes, or equivalent) at an architectural level
• Familiarity with the JVM ecosystem and event-driven architectures
• Experience applying machine learning outputs within real-time customer-facing systems
• Experience with decisioning, next-best-action, or personalisation platforms, or the broader martech and commercial platform space
• Telecommunications experience, or experience in similarly large, regulated enterprise environments
• Exposure to pricing, product catalogue, or commercial configuration systems
• Experience with agentic solutions