Job Description
Our Microsoft Cloud, Data & AI team helps organisations accelerate value from Microsoft Cloud by designing pragmatic, secure and scalable architectures for data and AI-enabled solutions. We often work in collaboration with our other specialist teams in Dynamics, Finance and Operations, Security and Cyber. We combine deep technical expertise, delivery discipline and business acumen to achieve measurable outcomes. The team is growing rapidly, and this role is key to ensuring the quality and consistency of what we deliver.
Your Opportunity
As a Solution Architect, you will own end-to-end architecture for Microsoft Cloud, Data and AI solutions, often extending into other elements of the Microsoft stack. You will lead design, guide implementation and assure quality across build, integration, security and operations. You will work closely with delivery leads, engineers and client stakeholders to translate business problems into well-architected solutions.
Key Responsibilities:
- Lead discovery and requirements workshops, translating business needs into architecture decisions and delivery roadmaps.
- Create reference architectures and reusable patterns for data platforms, analytics and AI workloads on Azure.
- Define non-functional requirements - including security, privacy, reliability, performance, cost and operability - and ensure these are engineered into solutions from the outset.
- Guide data architecture across ingestion, modelling and governance, including medallion and Fabric-native patterns.
- Design AI solution components including model selection, prompt engineering, RAG patterns, vector search and guardrails.
- Oversee detailed design and support engineering teams through delivery, code reviews and design authority forums.
- Establish CI/CD, IaC and DevSecOps standards using Azure DevOps or GitHub, including automated testing and policy as code.
- Collaborate with security, networking and platform teams to align with landing zone, identity and compliance requirements.
- Stay across emerging Microsoft capabilities and bring practical recommendations to clients and internal teams on where and how to apply them.
- Contribute to presales and sales through solutioning, estimation and technical proposals.
How are you extraordinary
- You articulate complex architecture simply and align stakeholders on clear decisions.
- You are hands-on enough to earn the respect of engineers, while staying focused on outcomes and quality.
- You continuously learn and apply emerging Microsoft capabilities to real client problems.
- You balance technical rigour with pragmatism - you know when good enough is the right answer.
Your Experience
- Experienced in architecting end‑to‑end Microsoft solutions on Azure, with strong depth across data and AI.
- Deep expertise across several of the following, with working knowledge across the rest:
- Data Platform - Data Factory, Synapse, Databricks on Azure, Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Azure Data Lake Storage, Event Hubs, Microsoft Fabric, Purview.
- AI & ML - Azure Machine Learning, Azure AI Services, Azure OpenAI Service, Foundry, vector databases and Azure AI Search, prompt engineering, RAG and LLMOps.
- Analytics - Power BI, semantic models, real-time analytics.
- M365 – co-pilot, Team, Sharepoint, and leveraging it as a collaboration capability with other Microsoft services
- Solid understanding of security and governance: identity and access management, networking, private endpoints, encryption, data classification, policy and compliance.
- Proficiency in IaC and CI/CD: Bicep or Terraform, GitHub Actions or Azure Pipelines, reusable modules and environment strategies.
- Experience with cost optimisation and observability: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, FinOps practices.
- Familiarity with integration patterns, microservices and event-driven architectures.
- Experience working in Agile delivery teams alongside engineers, delivery managers and other architects.
Qualifications
- Relevant degree in Computer Science, Information Systems or related field, or equivalent industry experience.
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert. Additional certifications in Data or AI are preferred.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.