Solution Architect

AWS | Microservices & Event-Driven Architecture

Cambridge - Hybrid - 2 days

The Opportunity

We're looking for an experienced Solution Architect to design and lead the implementation of scalable, cloud-native systems on AWS. You'll work across engineering, product and business stakeholders to define architecture for distributed microservices platforms powered by event-driven patterns — turning complex requirements into resilient, production-grade solutions. This is a high-impact, highly collaborative role. You'll be the technical authority on architecture decisions, shaping the standards and patterns engineering teams follow across the organisation.

What You'll Do

• Define end-to-end system architectures aligned to business goals, run architecture reviews and threat modelling sessions, and own the technical roadmap across multiple product domains.
• Lead service decomposition using Domain-Driven Design — defining bounded contexts, inter-service contracts, and REST/GraphQL/gRPC APIs — and set patterns for resilience (circuit breakers, retries, bulkheads) and observability (distributed tracing, structured logging, metrics).
• Design event streaming and async messaging using Kafka, Amazon SQS/SNS, EventBridge and Kinesis, including event schema standards, event sourcing, CQRS and saga orchestration.
• Design AWS infrastructure across EKS, Lambda, ECS/Fargate, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront and VPC networking, define IaC standards (Terraform and/or AWS CDK), and lead cloud migration and modernisation from on-premise to AWS.
• Partner with engineering leads, product managers and C-suite to align technical strategy with business objectives, presenting architecture proposals and trade-off analyses to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Embed security from day one (IAM, KMS, WAF, secrets management), design for reliability (multi-AZ, DR, SLAs/SLOs), and drive FinOps practices such as right-sizing and cost optimisation.
• Mentor and upskill senior engineers on architecture patterns and cloud-native practices.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years in a dedicated architecture role.
• Deep AWS expertise across core compute, storage and networking services.
• Microservices design experience: DDD, API design, service mesh, resilience patterns.
• Hands-on with event-driven patterns — Kafka, SQS/SNS, EventBridge or Kinesis.
• Infrastructure as Code — Terraform and/or AWS CDK.
• Strong container experience — Docker, Kubernetes, EKS, ECS.
• Established CI/CD pipeline and DevOps practice experience.
• Excellent stakeholder communication — comfortable presenting to both engineers and executives.

Nice to Have

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional.
• Service mesh experience (Istio, AWS App Mesh, Linkerd).
• Data architecture: streaming pipelines, data warehousing, data lakes.
• Serverless-first architecture and Lambda-optimised design.
• Multi-cloud or hybrid cloud exposure.
• FinOps tooling (AWS Cost Explorer, Kubecost, CloudHealth).
• Track record mentoring senior engineering talent.
• Familiarity with zero-trust networking and advanced IAM patterns.