Senior Architect

Job Description

At Aberdeen, our ambition is to be the UK’s leading Wealth & Investments group.

Strengthening talent and culture is one of our strategic priorities. We strive to make Aberdeen a great place to work so that we can attract and retain the industry’s best talent.

Our people put our stakeholders at the heart of everything they do by helping us to make a positive difference to the lives of our clients, customers, colleagues, shareholders, and society.

We are focused on growing our direct and advised wealth platforms and repositioning our specialist asset management business to meet client demand. We are committed to providing excellent client service, supported by leading technology and talent.

Aberdeen comprises three businesses, interactive investor (ii), Investments, and Adviser, each of which focuses on meeting and adapting to our clients’ evolving needs:

• interactive investor, the UK’s second largest direct-to-consumer investment platform, enables individuals in the UK to plan, save, and invest in the way that works for them.
• Our Adviser business provides financial planning solutions and technology for UK financial advisers, enabling them to create value for their customers.
• Our Investments business is a specialist asset manager that focuses on areas where we have both strength and scale to capitalise on the key themes shaping the market, through either public markets or alternative asset classes.

About The Role

Join us as a Senior Architect at Aberdeen, where you'll play a key role in designing and evolving our technology landscape. You will work with technology and business leaders in the Corporate Technology Office to define strategic technology direction, ensure consistent technology decision-making, and drive cost-efficient, modern and innovative solutions that generate business value.

Key Responsibilities:

• Have deep understanding of Corporate Functions such as Finance, HR, Risk, Legal, Audit, and Sustainability, along with knowledge of common corporate applications and emerging technology trends impacting these areas.
• Contribute to setting technology strategy & develop technical design principles. Use broad technology expertise and commercial acumen to build functional and technology-focused cost models to manage application costs. Create 2-3-year roadmaps to identify and recommend strategic opportunities.
• Seek out, build and maintain trusted relationships with internal and external stakeholders and research partners, using technical insight, influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes. Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior technology management.
• Demonstrate excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to present complex technical concepts and tell the story, adjusted to context. Anticipate challenges and build consensus around the most suitable approach.
• Impact-assess technical change, including estimation of delivery and ongoing run costs to feed into business case development. Collaborate with Procurement to drive cost-efficient commercial agreements and right-sized technology renewals.
• Lead technical design assurance & decision-making for Corporate Technology.

About The Candidate:

• Have experience in Financial Services or other highly regulated industry.
• Desirable to have Architecture Certification e.g. TOGAF or BCS.
• Demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours and accountabilities. Demonstrate self-leadership and ability to drive results with autonomy. Take ownership of personal training and development according to the needs of the role.
• Lead and own the strategy narrative to drive a consistent approach that delivers against Aberdeen’s business goals. Coach others. Demonstrate accountability for managing cost, risk and controls in relation to technology solutions.
• Focus on the big picture, demonstrate a proven track record of delivering large scale, end-to-end architectures using disparate technologies to solve complex business problems and deliver the agreed business and technology value.
• Understand modern application, data and security architectures with a focus on Microsoft cloud technologies and SaaS systems integrations, including ETL, APIs, Event-Driven Architectures, Azure Data Pipelines, Identity & Access Management including Single Sign On, Zero Trust, AI – specifically, M365 Copilot, modern engineering principles & practices - DevSecOps, Infrastructure as Code, FinOps, GreenOps and SAFe delivery.

We are proud to be a Disability Confident Committed employer. If you have a disability and would like to apply to one of our UK roles under the Disability Confident Scheme, please notify us by completing the relevant section in our candidate questionnaire. One of our team will reach out to support you through your application process.

Our Benefits

There's more to working life than coming home with a good salary. We have an environment where you can learn, get involved and be supported.

When you join us, your reward will be one of the best around. This includes 40 days’ annual leave, a 16% employer pension contribution, a discretionary performance-based bonus (where applicable), private healthcare and a range of flexible benefits – including gym discounts, season ticket loans and access to an employee discount portal. You can read more about our benefits here.

Our Business

Enabling our clients to be better investors drives everything we do. Our business is structured around three distinct areas – our vectors of growth – focused on our clients’ changing needs. You can find out more about what we do here.

An inclusive way of working

Whatever way you like to work, if you have the talent and commitment to join our team, we’d like to hear from you.

At Aberdeen we’ve adopted a ‘blended working’ approach. This approach combines the benefits of face-to-face collaboration, coaching and connecting in our offices with the flexibility of working from home. It enables colleagues to find a balance that works for their roles, their teams, our clients and our business.

An inclusive culture, where diverse perspectives drive our actions, is at the core of who we are and what we do. If you need assistance with your application, or a reasonable adjustment to your interview arrangements – for example, because you are neurodivergent, or have a physical, sensory, cognitive, mental, visible or invisible disability – please let us know and we’ll be happy to help.

We’Re Committed To Providing An Inclusive Workplace Where All Forms Of Difference Are Valued And Which Is Free From Any Form Of Unfair Or Unlawful Treatment.  We Define Diversity In Its Broadest Sense – This Includes But Is Not Limited To Our Diversity Of Educational And Professional Backgrounds, Experience, Cognitive And Neurodiversity, Age, Gender, Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation, Disability, Religion Or Belief And Ethnicity And Geographical Provenance.  We Support A Culture That Values Meritocracy, Fairness And Transparency And Welcomes Enquiries From Everyone.

If You Need Assistance Or An Adjustment Due To A Disability Please Let Us Know As Part Of Your Application And We Will Assist.