Solutions Architect

Location: London, England, United Kingdom

Department: UK Software Engineering

Workplace: hybrid

Employment Type: full

Description

Solutions Architect

London, England, United Kingdom · Hybrid · Full-time

About Simple Machines

Simple Machines is a leading independent boutique technology firm with a global footprint across London, Poland, Sydney and New Zealand. We are a team of creative engineers and expert technologists working at the intersection of data, AI, data engineering and software engineering. We partner with enterprises, technology companies and governments to design and build bespoke data platforms, intelligent systems and high-impact software products that bring data to life.

We engineer data to life™.

The Role

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.

What You’ll Be Doing

• 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

The Team

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.

Requirements

What We’re Looking For

Core Experience

• Significant experience as a Solutions Architect on large-scale enterprise platforms, with designs you have taken from concept through to production
• A consultancy background, or experience that closely resembles one: client-facing delivery, multiple engagements or programmes, and comfort operating inside someone else’s organisation
• A proven track record of managing complex stakeholder landscapes, aligning technical and business audiences with competing priorities
• Strong grounding in distributed systems, API design, and integration architecture
• Strong grounding in data processing, data warehousing, sql, no sql, data pipelines
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including clear and well-structured design documentation
• Sound judgement on trade-offs across cost, risk, delivery speed, and long-term maintainability
• 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.

Cloud & Infrastructure

• Experience architecting cloud-native platforms on a major public cloud
• Understanding of containerised and orchestrated deployments (Docker, Kubernetes, or equivalent) at an architectural level

Nice to Have

• 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
• Familiarity with the JVM ecosystem and event-driven architectures
• Exposure to pricing, product catalogue, or commercial configuration systems
• Experience applying machine learning outputs within real-time customer-facing systems
• Experience with agentic solutions