Solutions Architect

At Canopius, our Architecture and Design team is responsible for ensuring that technology investments are coherent, scalable and aligned to our enterprise strategy. We define the target architecture and design the solutions that enable the organisation to achieve its strategic and business goals, avoiding fragmented, point solutions that increase cost and complexity. We are building an interoperable technology estate that allows the business to respond quickly and innovatively to changing requirements and, in turn, provides external market advantage.

This role is an opportunity to apply your expertise in solution architecture, cloud and integration to translate business requirements into cohesive technical solutions, both discretely and with an eye on enterprise-level dependencies. You will contribute to key business transformation programmes, working closely with senior business and technology stakeholders and leveraging modern technologies. As a senior member of the team, you will also act as a role model to other staff across our delivery functions, providing guidance and support.

The ideal candidate is an experienced solution architect looking for a new challenge who is enthusiastic about embedding technology that is aligned to enterprise standards to accelerate change within our industry. You should have the ability to understand business problems and design efficient, reliable solutions tailored to our unique challenges, while maintaining a high degree of technical excellence and good architectural practice. You should be comfortable collaborating and working as part of a dynamic, multi-disciplinary team.

This role is central to delivering Canopius' technology vision through the design of new capabilities and the modernisation of our application and integration landscape. Alongside hands-on solution design, the role provides architectural leadership across transformation initiatives, helping to establish a future-focused, cloud-native technology ecosystem.

• • Provide solution architecture leadership and direction across business transformation initiatives, ensuring solutions are aligned to our business strategy and target architecture.

  • Develop a clear understanding of the requirements for a broad range of business initiatives and translate these into cohesive technical solutions, ensuring alignment with enterprise-level dependencies.

  • Architect enterprise-scale programmes, including new development, application re-engineering, and integration strategies.

  • Ensure solutions conform to internal technical architectural standards and principles, as well as external regulatory requirements.

  • Document existing and proposed architecture across transformation projects and the existing estate.

  • Communicate architectural solutions, trade-offs, risks and opportunities to both technical and non-technical audiences, managing expectations and influencing decisions with evidence-based recommendations.

  • Provide architectural guidance and solution oversight across multiple project teams, acting as a role model and mentor through pairing, early design reviews, peer review, constructive feedback and knowledge sharing, enabling others to solve problems independently.

  • Communicate effectively at all levels, from delivery teams to senior leadership, building trusted relationships across all regions and business areas to drive collaboration, alignment and shared outcomes.

  • Challenge requirements constructively and provide guidance on what is technically feasible, scalable and commercially viable.

  • Drive delivery of complex, end-to-end design and solution work, seeking clarification of ambiguous requirements, looking beyond the immediate scope to ensure alignment with the wider estate, and proactively flagging the risk of technical debt.

  • Lead planning and estimation activities, breaking complex work into deliverable increments, producing realistic estimates and highlighting dependencies, risks and non-functional requirements (e.g. performance, resilience, security) early.

• • Apply and evolve architecture and design standards (patterns, modelling conventions, naming, testing and deployment), determining when to introduce new patterns versus simplifying and reusing existing ones to keep the estate as common as possible and different only where necessary.

  • Design solutions for production operation, including documentation, monitoring, alerting, logging, access and defined support responsibilities.

  • Promote and drive adoption of modern engineering practices, AI technologies and automation opportunities across the team in a safe and reliable manner.

  • Undertake other ad-hoc duties as required.

Skills and Experience

• Proven experience as a Solution Architect, specifically around digital applications, software engineering, microservices, cloud and BPM.

• Strong understanding of architectural concepts, methodologies and approaches.

• Hands-on exposure to Azure cloud technologies across IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

• Excellent working knowledge of design patterns and modelling notations such as UML and BPMN, with strong design and documentation skills.

• Demonstrable knowledge and experience of technical architecture roles across all phases of the development lifecycle.

• Outstanding stakeholder management, client-facing and communication skills, including excellent written and verbal communication and the ability to present data and findings to stakeholders in a clear yet impactful way.

• Proven experience of providing expert guidance and direction on the design and evolution of systems architectures.

• Track record of design and delivery of large-scale, complex, integrated technology solutions.

• Proven ability to visualise, plan and execute the end-to-end of large deliverables, working effectively in cross-functional agile squads as well as on solo or small projects.

• Able to clarify the problem and business value before exploring solutions, and to translate ambiguous business needs into solutions, communicating the time, effort, risk and value of different approaches.

• Strong planning and estimation skills, breaking complex work into deliverable increments, surfacing dependencies, risks and non-functional requirements early, and balancing delivery momentum with a 'right first time' mindset to minimise rework.

• Track record of applying and evolving design and engineering standards, with the judgement to know when to introduce new patterns versus simplify and reuse existing ones to ensure consistency.

• Acts with integrity, accountability and reliability, with demonstrable curiosity and the ability to learn new tools, patterns and skills quickly, and to respond to incidents with a calm, structured approach.

• Experience of working with BizzdesignHorizzonEA Platform is advantageous.

• Familiarity with specialty (re)insurance or Lloyd's market data such as bordereaux, delegated authority, underwriting and claims is advantageous.