Solutions Architect - Leeds x2 per week

Job Title: Solution Architect
Location: Leeds two days a week (Tuesdays & Thursdays)
Salary/Rate: £700 Daily
Start Date: November
Job Type: Initial 6 month contract Inside IR35 - With potential to go permanent

Company Introduction
We have an exciting opportunity now available with one of our global telecoms clients! They are currently looking for a skilled solution architect to join their team for an initial six-month contract.

Accountabilities:

• First point of technical engagement on new initiatives: understand the outcome, the constraints and what the business is actually asking for.
• Produce options analysis and a clear recommended approach grounded in existing technical patterns and solution guardrails.
• Own the architecture artefacts: solution designs, context and integration diagrams, data flows for a given problem statement .
• Design non-functional requirements in from day one: security, identity, data protection, resilience, observability and cost.
• Provide early cost estimates and surface technical risks and dependencies before work is committed.
• Stay engaged through delivery. Review what is being built against the design and adjust the design deliberately when it no longer fits.
• Contribute to and evolve reference architectures, standards and reusable patterns.
• Bring designs to the Design Authority and work with Security, GRC and Platform on review and technical direction.

Essential experience:

• A proven Solution Architect, or a senior engineer who has carried real solution design responsibility, ideally in cloud-native or SaaS environments.
• An engineering background that holds up with engineers. You understand modern development practice because you have done it.
• Hands-on design on GCP or another major cloud, including serverless, managed databases and event-driven services.
• Strong in API design, integration patterns, microservices and event-driven architecture.
• Solid on identity: OAuth2/OIDC, federated identity and zero-trust principles.
• Designing for security, data protection and regulatory compliance in an enterprise setting.
• Familiar with Terraform, CI/CD and GitOps.
• Data architecture across relational and NoSQL stores, data modelling, and integration with ERP and HR platforms.
• Writes ADRs and runs design reviews as a matter of course.
• Pragmatic under ambiguity. You can make a sound call now without compromising where the architecture needs to be later.

Desirable:

• AI or agent-based solutions, especially evaluation, guardrails and human-in-the-loop design.
• Workflow automation.
• Back-office domain knowledge in Finance, Procurement or HR.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please apply now with your updated CV in Microsoft Word/PDF format.

Disclaimer
Notwithstanding any guidelines given to level of experience sought, we will consider candidates from outside this range if they can demonstrate the necessary competencies.
Square One is acting as both an employment agency and an employment business, and is an equal opportunities recruitment business. Square One embraces diversity and will treat everyone equally. Please see our website for our full diversity statement.