Principal Architect Part Time

11:FS Group

What we are looking for:

We are looking for an experienced technologist to form a key part of our senior engineering team, and help evolve our capability within the Consulting & Research part of 11:FS. You’ll be working with our clients, and will have an engineering background (biassing towards technical architecture). You’ll typically be working on our client engagements. Our typical ‘phase 1’ engagements are all about understanding the client’s needs and what their customers want, coming up with a solution, then prototyping it out. As a technical architect, you’ll be working in a truly cross-functional team with Product, Design and Research to define a solution, and provide expertise on what’s possible from a technology point of view.

Where we have more technology-focused engagement, you may work solo or in a small team to understand the client needs and problems, define the ideal ‘North Star’, then propose how they might do this.

In either case, where needed, we’re keen to move into building technology for or with the client, so it’s imperative that your work is not ‘ivory tower’, and that you’re able to work with our lead engineers to implement your architecture (while accepting that it will almost certainly change)

Within Consulting Engineering, our engineers work alongside our Research, Product, Design and Delivery colleagues in truly cross-functional teams to help solve our clients’ problems and – where appropriate – build products and services with them that are ‘Truly Digital’. We believe what we do is a ‘small team sport’, and we hire talented and motivated people who are passionate about working closely with our clients to solve their problems.

As a technical architect

• You have experience in building high-performance, highly scalable, fault tolerant products, services and systems in the capacity of an Architect or Lead Engineer.
• You’ve presented your ideas to both clients and colleagues, and are adept at taking them ‘on a journey’. You are outward- and inward-facing.
• You’re comfortable dealing empathetically with clients and understanding their problems, and also able to work with your colleagues to give them the information they need.
• We know you’ll have excellent verbal and written communication skills as well as the ability to produce engaging technical designs and documentation.
• You’re a self-starter, and able to operate as ‘the technologist’ in a cross-functional team with Product, Design, Research, offering opinions and pragmatism in meeting the needs of the client.
• You have a good understanding of the Financial Services and FinTech ecosystem, and have worked with vendors, Cloud, SaaS, APIs, etc. You can balance tactical vendor solutions against long-term strategic partners.
• You may be someone who can write code who’s looking for a more ‘bigger picture’ role.
• We’re big fans of event-driven architecture, so experience here is useful, as well as an understanding of tools like Kafka at an architectural level We also like ‘just enough’ architecture that gets a product to market fast whilst allowing for evolution and scale
• You’ll have some understanding of microservice architectures and when they’re appropriate (and when they’re not)

What you’ll be doing

• Working in a cross-functional team with Product, Design, Research on a client engagement, understanding the client’s technology, then defining the technology solution that might underpin and support the product.
• Creating high quality architectural diagrams, documentation and roadmaps, and working with the team to present ideas to clients and stakeholders.
• Talking to vendors and assessing and recommending their products to plug into your architecture to solve the client’s problems.
• Talking to our engineers to ensure your architecture is not ‘ivory tower’.Working in our cross-functional implementation teams with other engineers to realise your designs, making pragmatic changes where required.
• Feeding back your experiences to help engineering build ‘playbooks’ and engineering offerings which we can take to further clients.

Whilst London is our home, all Elevens work in a hybrid set-up with one or two days a week in our office. We want to be as flexible as possible so we are more than happy to talk with fully remote colleagues who can travel to London every so often.