Cloud Solutions Architect

Due to the nature of the role, you will need an active SC Clearance to be considered
Also this role does requre someone who can work onsite in Crawley 3 days a week.

An opportunity has arisen for a Cloud Data Architect within Flight Avionics (FLX) domain.
As an Architect, you will be responsible for translating customer requirements into data, software and cloud solutions that align with product policy, budget, timescales, and the customer value proposition, while encouraging innovation. Key responsibilities include defining, recommending, and establishing solution architectures at the appropriate level, ensuring alignment with stakeholder expectations, applicable standards, re-use policies, technology roadmap, and business strategy. You will be required to make trade-offs between technical solutions, costs, risks, schedules, and stakeholder needs; document associated artefacts; and approve resulting lower-level specifications.
This role is ideal for a strong individual contributor ready to transition into a leadership-focused position, combining architectural ownership with team guidance, customer engagement, and delivery accountability.
You will operate at the intersection of software architecture and product thinking, helping shape solutions from early concept through to deployment, while enabling and mentoring engineering teams to perform at their best.
Key Responsibilities and Tasks:
The list below is not exhaustive, nor will individuals be expected to be able to undertake all of them.
• Develop solution architectures, ensuring architectural integrity, alignment with business and customer needs, and compliant with functional and non-functional requirements.
• Define and own end-to-end architecture (cloud-native, distributed, scalable systems), ensuring adoption of DevSecOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and secure-by-design principles.
• Act as a customer-facing technical lead, translating requirements into robust solutions, and leading technical demonstrations and solution walkthroughs.
• Identify and mitigate technical risks through analysis of design and collaborative engagement with other design team members encompassing systems, software, security, safety and eco-design concerns.
• Conduct design trade-offs, make key decisions, and communicate outcomes effectively to all stakeholders.
• Collaborate across disciplines to deliver a cohesive, technically aligned solution, including clarification of assumptions, constraints, and dependencies.
• Interface with clients to define standards, architectural frameworks, and understand customer needs, providing expert technical advice as required.
• Plan and implement testing and validation methods to ensure solution compliance and quality.
• Document design decisions, rationales, and all relevant technical details to maintain traceability and clarity.
• Manage technical requirements flow-down from customer to subsystems, and support verification activities to demonstrate compliance.
• Prepare engineering plans, specifications, interface documents, test plans, technical reports, and ensure certification according to contract requirements and applicable legislation, including product safety.
• Work within company processes and the Engineering Management Plan, delivering projects on time, within budget, and to the required quality standards.
• Participate in engineering reviews and produce associated technical documentation.
Skills and Experience Required
• Strong understanding of architecture frameworks and design approaches, including how to use them to support requirements analysis, solution definition and decision making.
• Experience in product development and delivery experience in Cloud platforms (Azure and/or AWS), full-stack development and micro-services.
• Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines and DevSecOps practices.
• Experience delivering interoperable systems using open architectures, standards and interface specifications, and designing data-centric systems.
• Designing systems with governance, provenance, data-lineage and traceability.
• Implementing data pipelines and large-scale data handling.
• Proven track record of successful project delivery, demonstrating reliability in meeting objectives, deadlines, cost, and quality constraints.
• Experience leading technical demonstrations and customer-facing solution walkthroughs.
• Capable of simplifying and breaking down complex technical issues, prioritising design decisions and effective collaboration.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with a proven ability to produce precise, clear documentation.
• Effective collaborator, able to interface with internal and external stakeholders to ensure solution cohesion.
• Self-starter, adept at managing own workload and driving personal objectives, while supporting wider project goals.
• Openness to challenge others' ideas constructively and willingness to accept feedback.