Technical Architect

Description

This is a newly created position, set up to give Product Engineering dedicated architecture leadership and a technical specialist career path that runs alongside the existing management track.

The company is a price-reporting agency and information provider for global commodities. It supplies price data, news, analytics and events for agriculture, forest products, metals and mining, and new-generation energy markets. It was founded in 1865 and has more than 700 employees across the UK, US, China, India, Singapore, Brazil, Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland and other locations.

The role is highly cross-functional. You will work with engineering, data, cloud and product teams to standardise, govern and improve how software is designed and delivered, and you will help shape what a technical specialist career looks like at the company, serving as a model for it.

In your first six months, you are expected to build working relationships and trust across Product Engineering, Data & AI, Cloud Engineering and Product, and to be seen as a trusted technical voice by all of them. You will also work with the Head of AI Enablement, the Head of Data Platform and the Cloud Architect to set up the shared AI-enabled PDLC community and test its model on at least one domain-specific use case. You should also begin shaping, though not necessarily finalising, the architecture standards and governance approach across the three organisations.

Reporting and key contacts include the Director of Engineering, Product Engineering, the Head of AI Enablement, the Head of Data Platform, the Cloud Architect, Product Engineering squads and leads, Product counterparts, product owners, programme and delivery managers, third-party delivery partners, vendors and systems integrators, and the Enterprise Architect.

Responsibilities

• Own solution architecture and technical strategy for Product Engineering across all its squads.
• Give technical direction to Product Engineering's squads, set design standards, and make sure solutions are scalable, resilient and secure.
• Take architectural ownership of major programmes and projects, and join a delivery team part-time or full-time when the scale, complexity or risk of the work calls for it.
• Work with programme managers and product owners to keep architecture decisions, delivery order and technical dependencies in step.
• Serve as the escalation point for architecture decisions that span squads.
• Lead standardisation, governance and specialisation practice across Product Engineering, Data & AI and Cloud Engineering, working directly with the relevant teams in each.
• Work with Cloud Engineering's architecture function and Data & AI's platform architecture on decisions that affect more than one organisation.
• Review the designs and implementation of third-party delivery partners, vendors and systems integrators against the company's architecture standards, and hold them to those standards.
• Co-own, with the Head of AI Enablement, Head of Data Platform and Cloud Architect, the best-practice community for AI-enabled PDLC across the three organisations.
• Find, rank and address Product Engineering's domain-specific AI use cases within the shared PDLC model.
• Promote AI-assisted development tools and practices across Product Engineering.
• Own and define the specialist career path this role anchors, including the levels and capabilities that set out what a deep technical specialist is, as an alternative to the people-management track.

Requirements

• You have 12+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years at architecture or senior technical leadership level.
• You have worked as a solution or technical architect, setting technical direction and design standards across several teams or squads.
• You understand software architecture well: distributed systems, microservices, API design, service-oriented architecture and cloud-native patterns. The company runs mainly on Microsoft Azure.
• You have defined or contributed to technical standards, governance and engineering practice across multiple teams, and can create alignment without direct authority over every team.
• You have acted as architect on large, multi-team product programmes, working with programme managers and product owners and holding third-party suppliers or systems integrators to defined architecture standards.
• You have taken AI or GenAI capabilities from prototype to reliable, monitored production systems.
• You understand agentic and multi-agent AI design, including orchestration, tool use and agent coordination, and what it takes to run these systems in production.
• You have working knowledge of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), including ingestion, chunking, embeddings, vector search and production retrieval pipelines.
• You have led or strongly influenced an AI-enabled product development lifecycle, embedding AI in how software is built, not only in what is built.
• You can hold architecture conversations with senior technical and business stakeholders, and you can go into technical detail when needed.
• You communicate well and can bring Product Engineering, Data & AI and Cloud Engineering towards shared technical direction.
• You are deeply technical and lead through technical judgement, not process alone.
• You think strategically and can turn broad technical direction into concrete, achievable standards and practice.
• You are collaborative and can align teams without formal authority over them.
• You are comfortable with ambiguity, since the role is new and part of the work is shaping it.
• You are results-driven and focused on long-term technical health and career path impact, not only individual delivery.
• Candidates who do not match every point are encouraged to apply.

Conditions

Specific benefits can vary by country and role.

The company is an equal opportunities employer. If you need adjustments for the interview process, tell the company so it can arrange them.

Benefits

• The company Rewards gives you core benefits and a flexible allowance that you can use to fit your lifestyle, wellbeing and financial priorities.
• The company aims to offer fair pay and benefits that support you at work and outside it.