Lead Specialist - Technical Architect

Role: Lead Specialist, Technical Architect 

Location: Rotherham, London or Manchester, UK 

This role aligns with positions typically advertised in the external market as Lead Integration Architect, Principal Integration Engineer OR Technical Architect – Cloud Integration

Job Summary 

Design, build, and evolve cloud-based integration capabilities for the TOpS project. Take technical ownership of architecture, design, and implementation of integration solutions, leading engineers and delivery partners through development, testing, deployment, and ongoing platform evolution. This hands-on role combines technical leadership with direct engineering contribution, ensuring robust, scalable, and production-ready solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Take technical ownership of architecture, design, implementation, and production readiness of TOpS applications, leading engineers and delivery partners to successful delivery.
• Design and implement integration solutions using API, event-driven, and asynchronous messaging patterns, selecting approaches based on functional and non-functional requirements.
• Define and govern integration patterns, API contracts, event schemas, message contracts, and publishing patterns.
• Act as the senior hands-on technical authority, making implementation decisions, resolving complex issues, reviewing code, and providing day-to-day technical leadership and mentoring.
• Define and govern standards for retries, dead-letter handling, replay, idempotency, observability, and operational resilience.
• Provide architectural oversight and review integration designs across internal teams and suppliers, ensuring consistency with technical standards and engineering best practices.
• Drive technical excellence, performance, scalability, and engineering quality across TOpS applications.
• Provide hands-on technical ownership of CI/CD and deployment automation for integration services, including Git/GitHub, Jenkins, and Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or equivalent technologies.
• Support the operational lifecycle of cloud integration services, including releases, environment configuration, platform upgrades, and troubleshooting deployment, networking, and security issues.
• Collaborate with Data Architects to ensure enterprise data models are implemented consistently within integration solutions.

Required Skills and Experience

• Proven experience as a hands-on Technical Architect, Integration Architect, Lead Integration Engineer, or similar technical leadership role, with demonstrable experience architecting, designing, building, and taking enterprise cloud integration solutions into production.
• Strong understanding of enterprise integration patterns across synchronous APIs, asynchronous messaging, and event-driven integration.
• Strong software engineering background with recent hands-on experience developing enterprise integration solutions. Design solutions that span multiple products, tackling integration challenges such as data consistency, cross-product authentication and real-time event propagation.
• Experience designing and implementing API-based integrations, with a good understanding of API security, policies, versioning, routing, and operational considerations.
• Experience designing event-driven integration solutions, including event schemas, message contracts, Change Data Capture (CDC), Outbox patterns, event publishing, and resilient messaging.
• Practical experience with CDC-based integration and associated processing patterns such as checkpointing, batching, replay, and recovery.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and asynchronous messaging patterns, including message ordering, delivery guarantees, eventual consistency, retries, dead-letter queues, replay, checkpointing, idempotency, duplicate processing, failure recovery, observability, and operational resilience.
• Experience designing, performance-testing, and tuning high-volume integration workloads, including throughput, latency, batching, back-pressure, scaling, and recovery from processing backlogs.
• Practical experience with CI/CD, Git/GitHub, and automated deployment pipelines using technologies such as Jenkins and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or equivalent).
• Demonstrable recent hands-on engineering experience, with the ability to work directly with production code and personally design, develop, troubleshoot, and optimise complex enterprise integration solutions.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to lead technical discussions and work effectively across architecture and engineering teams.

Highly Desirable

• Experience using AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering productivity, while maintaining appropriate code quality, security, testing and technical governance.
• Experience working across both Azure and AWS cloud environments, including practical exposure to AWS integration services such as Lambda, DMS, SQS/SNS, EventBridge and Aurora (MySQL/PostgreSQL).
• Experience working within large-scale cloud transformation programmes involving multiple teams and suppliers.
• Experience working in highly regulated enterprise environments.