Engineering Lead / Solution Architect

The Engineering Lead / Solution Architect designs, builds and owns the architecture of ARM's high-volume, mission-critical transactional platforms, including investments, redemptions, payments, wallets and client servicing. This is a hands-on role: the jobholder writes and reviews code, makes binding architecture and technology decisions, and leads engineers to deliver secure, resilient and scalable solutions at pace.

The jobholder sets the engineering standard for ARM. That means architecture governance, modern engineering practices and the deliberate use of AI across the software development lifecycle to cut cycle times and raise quality, measurably.

This is not a people-management-only role. The successful candidate is expected to spend a meaningful share of time in code, design and production systems.

Responsibilities

Engineering leadership and delivery

• Lead one or more engineering squads to deliver production-grade features and platforms on time, with clear technical ownership.
• Translate business and product goals into delivery plans, technical roadmaps and well-sized engineering work.
• Remain hands-on: build critical components, prototype new patterns and unblock complex technical problems.
• Own production quality for assigned platforms, including incident response, root cause analysis and permanent fixes.

Engineering excellence and standards

• Define and enforce engineering standards: coding conventions, branching, code review, testing, documentation and definition of done.
• Drive the adoption of AI-assisted engineering (coding, code review, test generation, documentation, debugging and design) with clear guardrails on security, data privacy and human accountability.
• Reduce lead time for changes and deployment friction through automation, trunk-based practices and continuous delivery.
• Manage technical debt deliberately, with a visible backlog and agreed remediation investment.

People and capability

• Mentor and coach engineers; build clear growth paths from junior to senior and staff level.
• Contribute to hiring, technical interviews and onboarding to raise the engineering bar.
• Build a culture of ownership, psychological safety, blameless post-mortems and continuous improvement.

Technical & Architecture Responsibilities

• Solution architecture: Design end-to-end solutions for new products and integrations, documented through architecture decision records, C4 diagrams and clear non-functional requirements.
• Architecture governance: Lead architecture and design reviews; maintain reference architectures, approved patterns and the technology radar; align solutions with enterprise architecture and security policy.
• Transactional platforms: Design for correctness under load: idempotency, consistency models, distributed transactions (saga, outbox), reconciliation and auditability of every money movement.
• Microservices and events: Define service boundaries using domain-driven design; design event-driven flows on Kafka and RabbitMQ with schema governance and replay capability.
• APIs and integration: Own API design standards (REST, versioning, contracts), API gateway strategy and integration with banks, payment providers, custodians, regulators and fintech partners.
• Resilience: Build in circuit breakers, retries with backoff, timeouts, bulkheads, rate limiting and graceful degradation; validate them through failure and chaos testing.
• Performance and availability: Set and meet SLOs for latency, throughput and uptime; lead capacity planning, load testing and high-availability and disaster recovery design on Azure.
• Data architecture: Design data models, partitioning, indexing, caching and query optimisation for SQL Server, PostGRES and NoSQL stores; ensure data integrity and retention compliance.
• Cloud-native and DevOps: Architect containerised workloads (Docker, AKS) with infrastructure as code (Bicep or Terraform); own CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps with automated quality and security gates.
• Observability: Implement structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing (Grafana Loki, Prometheus, Application Insights) and actionable alerting across services.
• Security by design: Embed secure SDLC, threat modelling, OWASP and OWASP API Top 10 controls, OAuth 2.0/OIDC, secrets management and encryption; support compliance with NDPA 2023, SEC and CBN requirements.

Requirements

Qualifications and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field; a Master's degree is an advantage.
• 10+ years of hands-on software engineering, with at least 4 years as a tech lead, engineering lead or solution architect.
• Proven track record designing and running high-volume, mission-critical transactional systems in production, ideally in asset management, banking, payments, fintech or capital markets.
• Deep, current hands-on expertise in C# and .NET / .NET Core, plus working proficiency with React/Next.js and Flutter.
• Production experience with AWS, Azure DevOps, containerisation and CI/CD at scale.
• Demonstrated use of AI tools across the SDLC with evidence of measurable productivity or quality gains.
• Advantageous: Microsoft Azure or AWS Solutions Architect Expert, TOGAF, or Kubernetes (CKA/CKAD) certification; exposure to Nigerian payment rails and capital-market integrations.

Core Technical Competencies

• Enterprise and Solution Architecture
• Scalable Transactional Platforms
• Microservices and Event-Driven Design
• APIs, Gateways and Distributed Systems
• Messaging - Kafka, RabbitMQ
• Resilience Engineering
• Performance and High Availability
• Database Architecture
• CI/CD and DevOps
• Observability
• Secure Development and API Security
• Cloud-Native and Containers
• AI-Assisted Engineering
• Designs and defends architectures for complex, multi-system platforms.
• Balances trade-offs across cost, speed, risk, and scalability.
• Builds systems that maintain correctness and consistency at high transaction volumes.
• Ensures comprehensive audit trails and transactional integrity.
• Defines appropriate service boundaries and event contracts.
• Avoids tightly coupled or distributed monolithic architectures.
• Designs secure, versioned APIs.
• Manages gateway policies, throttling, authentication, and partner access.
• Selects the appropriate messaging technology for each use case.
• Handles ordering, delivery guarantees, retries, and dead-lettering.
• Applies circuit breakers, retries, timeouts, and graceful degradation.
• Experience with resilience frameworks such as Polly.
• Profiles and optimises .NET services for performance.
• Designs multi-zone, high-availability, and disaster-recovery architectures aligned to SLOs.
• Optimises database schemas, queries, and indexes.
• Designs caching strategies and read/write scaling mechanisms.
• Builds fully automated CI/CD pipelines.
• Integrates automated testing, security scanning, and safe deployment/release strategies.
• Makes systems highly diagnosable through logs, metrics, and distributed tracing.
• Correlates technical telemetry with business transactions.
• Leads threat modelling and secure development practices.
• Identifies and remediates vulnerabilities before production release.
• Designs cloud-native solutions using Azure PaaS and AKS.
• Uses Infrastructure as Code to automate and standardise environments.
• Uses AI tools daily for coding, code reviews, testing, documentation, and solution design.
• Establishes team guardrails and measures the impact of AI on engineering productivity and deployment speed.

Leadership Competencies

• Technical Authority
• Leads by Example
• Coaching and Talent Building
• Stakeholder Influence
• Delivery Focus
• Continuous Improvement
• Makes clear, well-reasoned architecture and technology decisions.
• Takes ownership of technical outcomes.
• Builds credibility through hands-on technical contribution, design quality, and production ownership.
• Develops engineers and improves their technical capability.
• Builds a strong pipeline of future technical leads.
• Communicates technical trade-offs clearly to business, risk, and executive stakeholders.
• Translates complex technical concepts into practical business language.
• Balances speed, quality, and risk.
• Removes blockers and keeps engineering teams focused on delivering outcomes.
• Uses data, engineering metrics, and retrospectives to continuously improve how the team builds, tests, and deploys software.