Lead Architect

Lead Architect

Salary: £120,000 per annum, plus company benefits

Location: Remote(must be based in the UK)

Contract: Full Time, Permanent

Shifts: 37.5 hours per week, Monday – Friday, 8:30am until 5pm with 1 hours unpaid lunch break

Work model: Fully remote

Williams Lea seeks a Lead Architect to join our team!

Williams Lea is the leading global provider of skilled, technology-enabled, business-critical support services, with long-term trusted relationships with blue-chip clients across investment banks, law firms and professional services firms. Williams Lea employees, nearly 7000 people worldwide, who provide efficient business services at client sites in often complex and highly regulated environments, from centralised Williams Lea onshore facilities, and through best cost company offshore locations.

Purpose of role

As Lead Architect, you will be the technical thought leader responsible for defining and driving our enterprise platform architecture strategy. You’ll design and govern our cloud-agnostic, security-first infrastructure that supports autonomous AI agents, complex integrations, and stringent regulatory requirements. This is a hands-on leadership role where you’ll balance strategic vision with practical implementation, ensuring our architecture scales elegantly across multi-cloud environments while maintaining the trust of our enterprise clients.

You’ll work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI technology and enterprise security, enabling our platform to deliver innovative agentic AI capabilities within the constraints of SOC2, ISO27001, and industry-specific compliance frameworks.

Key responsibilities

Strategic Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Establish and evolve the enterprise platform architecture strategy, ensuring alignment with business objectives and regulatory requirements
• Represent the company’s technical capabilities to enterprise clients, partners, and at industry events; publish technical content and contribute to architectural standards
• Drive cloud-agnostic design principles across AWS and Azure, ensuring portability and optimization for different deployment tiers
• Establish and enforce technical standards, design patterns, and best practices across all engineering teams
• Own major architectural decisions affecting platform scalability, security, performance, and compliance

Agentic AI Architecture

• Architect scalable infrastructure for autonomous AI agents, including orchestration, communication protocols, and execution environments
• Implement Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) standards, ensuring interoperability and secure agent communication
• Design abstraction layers for multiple LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock), enabling flexible model selection and cost optimization
• Establish frameworks for AI safety, ethics, model monitoring, and regulatory compliance specific to AI systems

Security & Compliance Architecture

• Embed security controls at every architectural layer, implementing zero-trust principles and defense-in-depth strategies
• Architect solutions meeting SOC2, ISO27001, GDPR, amongst others
• Design data residency and processing controls for multi-region deployments and client-specific compliance requirements
• Establish comprehensive logging, monitoring, and audit trail capabilities across all deployment tiers

Platform Architecture & Scalability

• Define service boundaries, API contracts, and integration patterns for loosely coupled, independently deployable services
• Design secure tenant isolation for SaaS deployments while enabling single-tenant options for enterprise clients
• Architect for high availability (99.9%+ uptime), low latency (<2s API response times), and horizontal scalability
• Define data management strategies including database per service patterns, event sourcing, and data pipeline architectures

Technical Team Leadership

• Guide solution architects on customer-specific implementations and enterprise integrations
• Work closely with development teams across Conversational AI, Integration, and AI Platform functions
• Lead architectural review board, evaluating proposed changes and ensuring consistency across teams
• Develop architectural capabilities across the engineering organization through coaching and knowledge sharing

Personal attributes

• 10+ years in enterprise software architecture, with at least 5 years in senior/principal architect roles
• Proven track record designing and delivering large-scale SaaS platforms for enterprise B2B customers ($250K+ contract values)
• Regulated industry experience in financial services, legal, healthcare, or similar highly regulated domains
• Cloud-native expertise with production experience architecting on both AWS and Azure at scale
• Security architecture experience including zero-trust, encryption, identity management, and compliance frameworks
• AI/ML platform experience, preferably including LLM integration and/or agentic AI systems

Technical Expertise

• Cloud & Infrastructure (Essential) - Deep expertise in AWS services (EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS, API Gateway, Cognito, KMS) - Strong knowledge of Azure (AKS, Functions, Cosmos DB, Service Bus, App Service, Key Vault, Azure OpenAI) - Container orchestration with Kubernetes in production environments - Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar) - Service mesh architectures (Istio, Linkerd) and API gateways - Multi-cloud networking, VPNs, private endpoints, and hybrid connectivity

• Security & Compliance (Essential) - Zero-trust architecture principles and implementation - Encryption standards (TLS 1.3, AES-256, key management, HSM integration) - Identity and access management (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, mTLS) - Security certifications: SOC2 Type II, ISO27001, PCI DSS compliance - GDPR, data residency, and financial services regulatory requirements - Threat modeling, security architecture reviews, and vulnerability management

• Software Architecture (Essential) - Microservices architecture and domain-driven design - Event-driven architecture and message-based systems - API design (REST, GraphQL, gRPC) and API management - Database architecture (SQL, NoSQL, time-series, vector databases) - Distributed systems patterns (circuit breakers, bulkheads, saga pattern) - Performance optimization and scalability patterns

Desirable Skills

• AI & Agentic Systems
• Experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar agent standards
• Real-time systems and WebSocket architectures
• Data pipeline architectures (streaming, ETL/ELT)
• Natural language processing and conversational AI platforms
• Financial data provider integrations (Bloomberg, Refinitiv)
• Legal technology or document intelligence systems

Certifications

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional (essential)
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (desirable)
• Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP/E) for GDPR expertise (desirable)

Rewards and Benefits

We believe in supporting our employees in both their professional and personal lives. As part of our commitment to your well-being, we offer a comprehensive benefits package, including but not limited to:

• 25 days holiday, plus bank holidays(pro-rata for part time roles)
• Salary sacrifice schemes, retail vouchers – including our TechScheme which can be used on a range of gadgets such as Smart TV’s, laptops and computers or household appliances.
• Life Assurance
• Private Medical Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Health Assessments
• Cycle-to-work scheme
• Discounted gym memberships
• Referral Scheme

You will also have the opportunity to work for a global employer who is dedicated to offering each and every employee an enjoyable, challenging and rewarding career with future career development prospects!

Equality and Diversity

The Company values the differences that a diverse workforce brings to the organisation and will not discriminate because of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race (which includes colour, nationality and ethnic or national origins), religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation (each of these being a “protected characteristic” in discrimination law). It will not discriminate because of any other irrelevant factor and will build a culture that values openness, fairness and transparency.

If you have a disability and would prefer to apply in a different format or would like to make a reasonable adjustment to enable you to make an interview please contact us at careersatWL@williamslea.com(we do not accept applications to this email address).

View our Privacy Notice https://www.williamslea.com/privacy-statement