Senior Solution Architect

Company Description

Informa is a leading academic publishing, business intelligence, knowledge and events business, creating unique content and connectivity for customers all over the world. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a member of the FTSE 100.

Taylor & Francis is one of the world’s largest publishers of high-quality, peer reviewed scholarly journals, books, e-books and reference works. We empower learners, thinkers and doers with trusted knowledge that advances research and enriches lives. We bring together diverse people, ideas and opinions to validate and publish the experts, theories and truths that matter. And we’ve been doing this in an unbroken arc since 1798.

Our purpose is to foster human progress through knowledge. We strongly believe that this requires us to encourage and examine different ideas and voices, so that any work that meets our exacting levels of quality deserves to be included in our publications. This requires open minds, the opportunity for robust debate, and the courage to defend perspectives that stand up to scrutiny, even if they conflict with our personal beliefs or values. Because that’s the only way to find the best obtainable version of the truth and, ultimately, foster human progress. If you agree, then we’d love to hear from you.

Job Description

The Senior Solution Architect is a senior architecture practitioner and trusted technical adviser, embedded in one or more domains / value streams rather than sitting above them. The scope of impact of this role is domain-deep rather than enterprise-wide: where the Enterprise Technology Architect sets the target-state reference architecture and golden paths for all of Product & Technology, the Senior Solution Architect goes deep into a specific domain's systems and roadmap implications to make those standards real for the teams living with them day to day. This role leads through architectural credibility, coaching and trusted advice rather than through management authority, design ownership, or ownership of the roadmap itself. This role reports to the Director of Architecture.

Taylor & Francis' Product & Technology group is moving to a domain-based operating model grounded in clear ownership boundaries, domain-aligned roadmaps, and cross-domain integration standards. In this model, engineering teams — not architects — own day-to-day solution design, and Delivery/Product own the domain roadmap and its sequencing; the Senior Solution Architect's job is to make both of those forms of ownership succeed. The Senior Solution Architect partners closely with Heads of Engineering, Tech Leads, Product and Delivery, bringing the architectural view — feasibility and structural blockers — that makes their roadmap sequencing decisions sound. This role, along with all of our P&T teams, supports the evolution from a traditional academic publisher to a "Knowledge Marketplace."

We seek someone who treats architecture as a service to the domain, not a gate in front of it. The Senior Solution Architect defaults to enabling engineering teams to make good decisions themselves, reserving their own direct involvement for cross-domain complexity, significant decisions, and the moments where a domain genuinely needs an outside, options-based view. They are equally credible advising an Engineering Head on target architecture, simplification opportunities, and architectural decision records (ADRs).

Key Responsibilities

• Domain Solution Architecture

• Own solution architecture for one or more assigned domains / value streams, establishing the architectural guardrails and patterns within which engineering teams design and evolve solutions, aligned to DDD bounded contexts

• Enable and coach domain engineering teams to take accountability for their own solution design decisions, building architectural confidence within the team rather than centralising decisions with the Senior Solution Architect

• Turning the Enterprise Technology Architect's pre-shape input into a domain-specific design on significant initiatives, and cross-domain complexity teams aren't positioned to resolve alone

• Where the ETA's golden path genuinely doesn't fit the domain's reality, raise that back as a candidate exception or a change to the golden path itself, rather than quietly deviating from it

• Coordinate cross-domain solution designs, convening peer Senior Solution Architects and the relevant domain teams so an initiative that spans multiple domains lands as one coherent design rather than several locally-optimised ones

• Trusted Advisory — Target Architecture and Simplification

• The Senior Solution Architect shapes the domain roadmap without owning it. Delivery own the roadmap artefact, its cross-initiative sequencing, and the resourcing decisions behind it; the Senior Solution Architect's job is to make sure the architectural constraints and structural blockers that should inform their sequencing calls are visible, credible and current — not to produce, own or sequence the roadmap.

• Act as the domain's trusted technical adviser to the Head of Engineering and domain leadership, bringing an architect's view to decisions that are as much about long-term feasibility as they are about design

• Identify and size simplification opportunities within the domain — application rationalisation, consolidation, retirement candidates — acting as the Enterprise Technology Architect's primary source of ground truth for the application portfolio, which is only as good as the domain input feeding it

• Treat systemic technical issues a Staff Engineer surfaces across multiple domains as a priority input to this simplification view — their cross-domain vantage point often sees a pattern before any single domain-anchored SSA would, so build on that discovery rather than duplicating it

• Feed Programme/Portfolio Management's near-term sequencing with a domain-specific architectural view

• Delivery Assurance & Governance

• Prepare Engineering Leaders for Architecture Advisory Forum (AAF) participation, ensuring they understand the context, implications, and options for decisions requiring their input, and maintain a curated architectural update stream so Engineering Leaders remain informed of cross-domain decisions and enterprise direction

• Pull the domain's Staff Engineer(s) into significant AAF submissions and architecture reviews: the Senior Solution Architect brings the solution view, Staff Engineers bring the delivery-feasibility and engineering-practice view, and a recommendation that hasn't been pressure-tested by both is weaker for it

• Identify and coordinate the resolution of cross-domain technical dependencies that span team boundaries and that no single domain team is positioned to see or resolve alone

• Provide guidance to delivery teams during construction to keep implementation aligned with agreed solution direction, and bring changes back through governance when Construction surfaces the need for them

• Work with domain leadership to maintain visibility of technical debt and simplification opportunities within the domain, and keep them prioritised and visible rather than allowed to accumulate silently

• Partnership with Engineering, Product & Delivery

• Partner with the Head of Engineering as an enabling presence, not a decision-making authority over day-to-day solution design or a substitute for their people leadership, delivery ownership or hiring accountability

• Work alongside Tech Leads as peers on solution direction — Tech Leads and their teams own day-to-day solution decisions; the Senior Solution Architect sets guardrails, reviews the significant ones, and takes on cross-domain complexity they can't resolve alone

• Partner with Product to ensure architectural options put in front of domain leadership reflect real delivery capacity and cost constraints, not an idealised version of either

• Partner closely with Staff Engineers, who bring engineering practice excellence — testing strategy, CI/CD, observability, AI-first delivery tooling — across multiple domains. The Senior Solution Architect focuses on what should be built and why it makes sense for the domain, including whether to incorporate an AI capability and what it costs to build, run and govern long-term; Staff Engineers focus on how teams build it well.

• Work with the Enterprise Technology Architect, Enterprise Business Architect and Director of Architecture to translate the enterprise's target-state vision — technology, capability and overall architecture direction — into concrete alignment across domain teams and designs, so every domain is building toward the same destination rather than a locally consistent but divergent one

• Work with the Business Architect day-to-day to keep domain solution decisions aligned to agreed capability boundaries and operating-model guidance, flagging where the two are pulling apart

• Work collaboratively with Delivery — they own the roadmap and its sequencing; the Senior Solution Architect provides the architectural constraints, implications and structural-blocker visibility that inform it

• Deliverables

• Key artefacts the Senior Solution Architect produces or maintains, but always in service of team autonomy rather than as a default output for every initiative:

• Domain solution architecture documentation, kept current rather than produced once and left to decay

• Architecture Decision Records — both those authored for cross-domain decisions and those reviewed for teams within the domain

• Solution design proposals for significant initiatives: As-Is, Proposed Changes and To-Be views

• Domain input into the application portfolio, technology radar and enterprise pattern library

Qualifications

• Skills & Experience

• Deep, hands-on solution architecture experience within a specific domain or value stream, ideally in a technology-focused company in the media & publishing sector

• Expert-level AWS knowledge across compute (ECS/Fargate, Lambda, containers and orchestration), data and storage, networking, identity and security, and the Well-Architected Framework — able to make credible, cost-literate build/run trade-off calls rather than defer them

• Deep working knowledge of non-functional requirements as first-class design concerns — scalability and performance under load, observability (logging, tracing, metrics, alerting), security (threat modelling, secure-by-design, data protection), resilience and disaster recovery

• Practical experience with AI and its associated technology stack, including:

• LLM application patterns — retrieval-augmented generation, prompt engineering, agentic and multi-agent orchestration frameworks

• Vector stores, embeddings, and the data pipelines that feed them

• Model selection trade-offs — fine-tuning vs. RAG vs. prompt engineering, and the cost/latency/quality trade-offs between them

• Managed vs. self-hosted inference (e.g. AWS Bedrock, SageMaker) and the cost economics of each

• LLMOps — prompt and model versioning, evaluation, monitoring, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop review points

• Responsible AI and governance — bias and hallucination mitigation, explainability, and awareness of regulatory considerations such as the EU AI Act

• AI-specific security considerations — prompt injection, data leakage, PII exposure in prompts or training data, and model supply chain risk

• Publishing-specific AI and IP considerations — text & data mining rights, content licensing for AI training and inference, and provenance/attribution of AI-assisted content

• Strong working knowledge of Domain-Driven Design, Team Topologies, and modern engineering ways of working

• Ability to distil complex technical and commercial trade-offs into options domain leadership can actually decide between, under time pressure and with incomplete information

• Deep understanding of how architectural recommendations connect to cost, delivery sequencing and financial planning, not just technical soundness

• Pr