Lead Solution Architect - Networks

Location: Leeds or Manchester, UK; hybrid working with at least two days per week or 40% of working time at an office site

Salary: £92,701–£109,060 per year

Company

hirify.global is a major UK financial services organisation transforming its technology estate to serve millions of customers and thousands of colleagues.

What you will do

• Lead solution architecture for networks connecting data centres, hosting locations, offices, branches, and external services.
• Design resilient, secure, and scalable network, security, and infrastructure delivery patterns.
• Define reusable connectivity patterns and guide migration approaches for major transformation initiatives.
• Make architecture decisions covering routing, domain name services, load balancing, traffic flow control, and application deployment.
• Coordinate architecture, engineering, cyber security, platform, delivery, service teams, and suppliers.
• Connect strategic architecture decisions with secure design, assurance, deployment, operations, compliance, and risk management.

Requirements

• Deep experience designing network architectures across large-scale, regulated organisations.
• Broad knowledge of data centre, cloud, campus, office, branch, wide-area, internet, and partner connectivity.
• Experience with software-defined networking, hybrid and multi-cloud networking, network automation, and modern connectivity and security technologies.
• Ability to design, govern, and assure network control architectures covering segmentation, access control, firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, encryption, policy enforcement, observability, and security control mapping.
• Experience producing target-state architectures, option assessments, high- and low-level designs, architecture decision records, standards, patterns, and governance submissions.
• Strong collaboration, communication, strategic judgement, practical delivery, line management, mentoring, and architecture or engineering team management skills.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative environment focused on curiosity, clear thinking, and shared learning.
• Opportunities to develop architecture skills and work on high-profile infrastructure transformation.
• Pension contribution of up to 15% and an annual performance-related bonus.
• Share schemes, including free shares, and lifestyle benefits such as discounted shopping.
• 30 days of holiday plus bank holidays, wellbeing initiatives, and generous parental leave.
• Workplace adjustments and flexibility in office attendance, location, and working patterns are available for colleagues with disabilities or health conditions.

Hiring process

• Reasonable adjustments are available throughout the recruitment process.
• Applicants meeting the minimum criteria may receive an interview through the Disability Confident Scheme where applicable.