Senior Solutions Architect - VP

About the role

Join our team as a Senior Solutions Architect - VP and help drive the next wave of innovation across Barclays' global transaction banking platforms. In this role, you will work on strategic initiatives that enable business growth, support expanding client franchises, and shape the future of digital banking. Operating within a Scaled Agile delivery model, you will partner with product, engineering, and business leaders to deliver high-impact solutions while pioneering the use of Agentic AI frameworks to improve technology design, governance, and delivery.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and implement solutions to complex business problems, collaborating with stakeholders to understand their needs and requirements.
• Create solutions that balance technology risks against business delivery, driving consistency and alignment with modern software engineering practices.
• Develop solutions as evolving products that meet business requirements, including identification and implementation of technologies and platforms.
• Apply targeted design activities with an appropriate workload placement strategy, maximizing the benefit of cloud capabilities such as elasticity, serverless, and containerization.
• Incorporate best practice designs with security principles (e.g., defense in depth, reduction of blast radius) to meet the bank’s resiliency expectations.
• Ensure solutions appropriately balance risks and controls to deliver agreed business and technology value.
• Adopt standardized solutions where applicable; if no standard solutions fit, contribute to their ongoing evolution.
• Support operational teams in fault finding and performance issue resolution by leveraging available tooling.
• Conduct solution design impact assessments in terms of risk, capacity, and cost, including estimation of project change and ongoing run costs.
• Develop architecture inputs required to comply with the bank’s governance processes, including design artifacts for architecture, privacy, security, and records management.
• Partner with product, engineering, and business leaders to deliver high-impact solutions within a Scaled Agile framework.
• Pioneer the use of Agentic AI frameworks to enhance technology design, governance, and delivery.

Requirements

• Proven experience in end-to-end Solution Architecture, designing and delivering complex enterprise solutions from concept through implementation.
• Ability to clearly articulate solution design decisions, technology choices, trade-offs, and how the architecture meets both business and technical requirements.
• Strategic decision-making skills, applying architectural judgment to make effective technology decisions in complex and ambiguous environments.
• Deep expertise in modern technology leadership, including cloud, APIs, integration, data, and modern engineering practices.
• Influential stakeholder management, driving alignment across business, product, engineering, and architecture teams without direct authority.
• Experience with risk, security, and resilience to ensure solutions are secure, compliant, resilient, and fit for enterprise-scale operation.

Qualifications

The following skills are highly valued but not mandatory:

• Innovation and AI adoption, including experience with Agentic AI frameworks and AI-enabled delivery.
• Commercial and value orientation, linking architectural decisions to measurable business outcomes.
• Experience working effectively within Agile Release Trains and value streams (Scrum/Agile Delivery).
• Standardization and reuse, accelerating delivery through platform adoption and architectural patterns.
• Executive communication, explaining complex technology decisions in business terms.

Vice President Expectations

• Contribute to or set strategy, drive requirements, and make recommendations for change.
• Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures.
• If managing a team: define jobs and responsibilities, plan for future departmental needs, counsel employees on performance, and contribute to pay decisions. Lead specialists to influence departmental operations in alignment with strategic and tactical priorities while balancing short- and long-term goals.
• For individual contributors: serve as a subject matter expert, guide technical direction, lead collaborative multi-year assignments, and mentor less experienced specialists. Provide insights affecting long-term profits, organizational risks, and strategic decisions.
• Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership and senior management, on areas of impact and alignment.
• Manage and mitigate risks through assessment in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in your team’s work.
• Collaborate with other business areas to stay aligned with business activity and strategies.
• Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought, comparing and selecting complex alternatives.
• Incorporate outcomes of extensive research into problem-solving processes.
• Build and maintain trusting relationships with internal and external stakeholders to accomplish key business objectives using influencing and negotiating skills.
• Demonstrate Barclays Values: Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence, and Stewardship.
• Embody the Barclays Mindset: Empower, Challenge, and Drive.

Location

This role is located in our Whippany, New Jersey office.

Pay

Base salary range: $170,000 – $230,000. This range includes only base salary; other types of compensation or benefits are not included.

Benefits

Barclays employees are eligible for a suite of competitive and generous benefits, including:

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• 401(k) retirement plan.
• Life insurance.
• Paid leave for qualifying circumstances.

This position is also eligible for an incentive award.