Contract Length: 6 Months (Initial, with a strong likelihood of extension)
Rate: Competitive Day Rate (Dependent on experience)
Industry: Global Investment Banking
About the Client & Team Join one of the world’s largest and most prestigious financial institutions. We are seeking a talented Senior Solutions Architect to join a high-performing Risk Technology team. This is a unique opportunity to design mission-critical applications within one of the most dynamic, complex, and fascinating areas of global banking. If you thrive on solving intricate financial data puzzles, driving innovation, and designing resilient, high-volume systems, this is the contract for you.
Key Responsibilities As a Senior Solutions Architect, you will balance strategic design with hands-on technical validation:
Solution Design: Responsible for designing and documenting robust solutions to help solve complex business problems.
Standards & Governance: Define and enforce architecture standards, coding best practices, and robust DevOps/CI-CD pipelines.
Hands-on Innovation: Develop Proof of Concepts (PoCs) and lead R&D initiatives to validate technical feasibility and drive innovation.
Collaboration: Partner closely with Risk, Compliance, and Engineering teams to translate business needs into elegant technical solutions.
Documentation & Visualisation: Create high-quality UML diagrams, Visio workflows, and clear technical documentation tailored for diverse stakeholders (from developers to C-suite executives and auditors).
Tech Strategy: Advise on technology selection, vendor evaluations, and cost-benefit analyses for core risk systems.
Mentorship: Guide and mentor engineering teams on risk-aware design patterns, cloud security, and resilient architecture.
Required Skills & Qualifications To excel in this role, you will ideally bring a strong blend of the following:
Experience: 5+ years of dedicated experience in Solution Architecture (or equivalent senior architectural roles).
Architecture Patterns: Deep expertise in microservices/SOA design within containerised environments.
Data & Integration: * Proven experience with high-volume ETL and data processing systems.
Experience designing polyglot systems using diverse database technologies: RDBMS (SQL Server or PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (ideally MongoDB).
Strong expertise with RESTful/GraphQL web APIs and asynchronous communication flows (using Redis Streams, Kafka, etc.).
Communication & Stakeholder Management: Exceptional communication, diagramming (UML/Visio), and presentation skills. The ability to simplify highly complex technical concepts for non-technical audiences.
Bonus Skills
Experience with TimeSeries databases (such as Prometheus) or Graph-native databases (e.g., Neo4j or TigerGraph).