Job Title: Technical Architect
Division: Beazley Shared Services - IT
Reports To: As per Beazley’s organisation chart
Key Relationships: Enterprise Architecture, Data Architecture, Solution Architecture, Value Stream Leads, Value Stream Product Managers, Data Engineering, Technical Leads, Third Party Outsourcer
Job Summary: The Technical Architect is responsible for defining and evolving the technical architecture across Beazley’s IT landscape, ensuring solutions are robust, scalable, secure, and aligned with our domain-driven, event-driven principles. This role provides technical leadership across multiple teams, setting direction for .NET, front-end frameworks, and integration patterns. The Technical Architect will design and document architectural standards, guide teams toward our north star architecture, and champion best practices in automation, DevOps, and cost optimisation. Acting as a trusted advisor, this role influences stakeholders, fosters collaboration, and ensures technology decisions support Beazley’s strategic objectives for innovation, operational excellence, and long-term sustainability with a strong focus on domain-driven design and event-driven architecture leveraging Kafka and related technologies.
Key Responsibilities:
Architecture & Design
- Design: Lead the design and implementation of solutions aligned with our domain-driven, event-driven architecture. Ensure designs are robust, scalable, and maintainable, with a strong focus on separation of concerns and modularity.
- Technology Leadership: Set the technical direction for .NET (Framework and Cross-Platform), Angular, Vue (TypeScript), and complementary technologies. Actively promote the adoption of modern patterns, frameworks, and tooling.
- Event-Driven Patterns: Design, evolve, and document asynchronous communication patterns using Kafka, Mass Transit, and patterns such as CQRS, Event Sourcing, and Outbox. Ensure effective message contracts and event schemas across domains.
- Integration: Oversee the integration between systems and domains, ensuring loose coupling and effective use of message brokers for both new and existing Kafka topics and streams.
Technical Leadership
- Standards & Best Practices: Define, document, and advocate for technical standards (coding, testing, deployment) to ensure consistency and high quality across teams. Regularly review and update standards as technologies and practices evolve.
- Mentoring & Coaching: Provide guidance, mentorship, and technical support to engineers. Foster a culture of continuous learning, collaboration, and professional development.
- Architectural Roadmaps: Contribute to the creation and ongoing refinement of architectural roadmaps that guide teams toward our north star architecture. Clearly communicate the rationale and benefits of these roadmaps.
- DevOps & Automation: Support the adoption and improvement of CI/CD practices, automated testing (unit, integration, E2E, contract), and containerisation (Docker). Identify opportunities to automate repetitive tasks and improve developer productivity.
- Cost Reduction & Simplification: Actively seek opportunities to reduce cost within the domain by simplifying architecture and ensuring alignment to our north star architecture. Regularly review existing solutions to identify and eliminate unnecessary complexity, duplication, or outdated approaches, and promote efficient, sustainable patterns.
Security & Compliance
- Ensure all solution designs adhere to Beazley’s security, regulatory, and compliance standards by embedding secure‑by‑design principles, proactively identifying architectural risks, and collaborating with security and risk teams to maintain alignment with organisational and industry best practices.
Collaboration & Influence
- Team Collaboration: Work closely with technical leads and engineers in your domain group(s), providing architectural direction and support as needed.
- Stakeholder Influence: Communicate technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders, influencing business decisions where required to ensure alignment with architectural goals.
- Documentation: Produce and maintain comprehensive technical documentation, including architectural diagrams, decision records, and standards documentation. Ensure documentation is accessible, up-to-date, and valuable for both current and future team members.
Personal Specification:
Essential Criteria
- Strong hands‑on expertise in .NET Framework and .NET Core/6+, with proven architectural design and optimisation experience
- Deep practical experience with event‑driven architecture, including CQRS, Event Sourcing, Outbox patterns, Kafka, and Mass Transit
- Demonstrated ability to define and drive technical standards, best practices, and architectural roadmaps across multiple teams
- Proven technical leadership skills, including mentoring engineers, influencing stakeholders, and communicating complex concepts clearly
- Experience designing scalable, secure, cloud‑based distributed systems and integrating solutions using modern messaging and integration patterns
Technical Skills
- .NET Expertise: Strong hands-on experience with .NET Framework and .NET Core/6+ (cross-platform), including solution architecture, design patterns, and performance optimisation.
- Cloud Architecture: Proven experience designing scalable, secure, and cost‑efficient cloud solutions, leveraging modern cloud services and best‑practice patterns to support distributed, event‑driven systems.
- API Design: Expertise in designing clean, consistent, and secure APIs using modern architectural patterns, ensuring clear domain boundaries, high usability, and long‑term maintainability across distributed systems.
- Front-End Frameworks: Demonstrable experience with Angular and/or Vue, with strong TypeScript skills. Ability to architect and review front-end solutions for scalability and maintainability.
- Event-Driven Architecture: In-depth knowledge and practical experience with event-driven patterns (CQRS, Event Sourcing, Outbox), Kafka, and Mass Transit. Proven ability to design and evolve message flows and contracts.
- Integration: Experience integrating distributed systems using asynchronous messaging, event brokering, and related middleware.
- DevOps & Automation: Familiarity with Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing (unit, integration, E2E, contract). Commitment to automation and continuous improvement.
- Documentation: Ability to produce high-quality technical documentation, including diagrams, standards, and architectural decision records.
Leadership & Soft Skills
- Proven ability to lead technical teams and influence stakeholders across the organisation.
- Experience in influencing enterprise-level decisions.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills to work effectively with cross-functional teams.
- Strategic thinker with strong problem-solving and decision-making abilities.
- Ability to balance innovation with operational stability and cost optimisation.
Preferred Experience
- Experience in financial services or regulated industries.
- Familiarity with DevOps, CI/CD, and Infrastructure-as-Code practices.
- Experience with distributed systems and high-availability architectures.
Aptitude and Disposition
- Reliable: Do what you say you will do, be a person that others can depend on & don’t let the team down.
- Enthusiastic: We want people who are passionate about their work & always show a ‘can do’ attitude.
- Communicator: Work as a team and share ideas, risks & issues in a constructive and professional manner; ensure that decisions are auditable & clear.
- Respectful: Consider other people’s opinions, engage in constructive conversation and show unshakeable professionalism.
Education and Qualifications
- Degree-level education or equivalent commercial experience.
Competencies
At Beazley IT we focus on our “Future Selves”. These competencies & capabilities include:
- Business Acumen
- Adaptable yet Challenging
- Stakeholder Partnership
- Collaborative
- Engineering Mindset
- Data Driven
- Innovation and continuous improvement
