Product Architect

at  Financial Conduct Authority

Product Architect
Salary: National ranging from £65,200 to £104,000 and London from £67,900 to £114,000
The team/department
The Product Architect role sits within the Data Collections Product Group, and is responsible for the overall architecture, including service design, for the product group aligning with the organisational Data Strategy and supporting us on our journey to be a Data-led Regulator.
We work closely with frontline business areas and data analysts to ensure the data collected is of value without negatively impacting the end users experience or burden. We place an increasing emphasis on curiosity and regularly experiment with new techniques and approaches to support our change delivery.
This role includes creation of the technical product roadmap, and quality assurance and governance of architectural decisions, technical designs and other architectural deliverables to ensure alignment to enterprise platform and integration strategies, standards and patterns.

What you will be doing (the role)

• Shaping the product roadmaps which identifies the scope, prioritisation and timeframes for delivery, including integration and specification of the products’ solution design as well as addressing technical debt
• Producing the technology and service architecture solutions, ensuring they align with enterprise product strategies and taking them through the relevant Design Authorities. The solutions will include consideration of capacity management, ITSCM, data governance, security, and software licensing requirements
• Review and quality assure artefacts created by external suppliers and internal teams ensuring the quality of the delivered solution to fulfil business and non-functional requirements and adhere to strategic vision for the product group and FCA
• Identifying opportunities for product innovation and shape design proposals for taking this forward; driving innovation at a product level where this delivers quick wins and business benefit and is in the boundary of the product roadmap

• Leading contributions to the relevant communities of practice, providing thought leadership, coaching and mentoring of other employees to build the overall business, technical and product architect capability

  What you will get from the role

• Stimulating, innovative and experimental work to improve the collection of financial regulation data across the organisation

• Exposure to new ideas, opportunity to increase your knowledge and understanding of new technologies in Financial Regulation
• A sense of purpose in the job, knowing that your helping serve those in need

Our competitive flexible benefits scheme gives you the opportunity to create a personalised benefits package, tailored to suit your lifecycle. You can use this allowance to purchase additional benefits such as dental or cycle to work or you have the option top up your base salary by taking this as cash.

Core benefits that you will receive as standard are:

• 28 days holiday per year plus bank holidays
• Private healthcare with Bupa
• A non-contributory Pension of at least 8% of basic salary each month (there are several contribution levels that increase depending on your age – up to 12% a month once you reach age 35)
• Life assurance of eight times your basic salary
• Income protection

We support hybrid working which means you will be able to work from home up to 60% of the time over a month with the remainder of your time in one of our three office locations.
The skills and experience you will have
Minimum

We are a signatory to the Government’s Disability Confident scheme. This means that we will offer an interview to disabled candidates entering under the scheme, should they meet the minimum criteria for a role.

• Involvement as a solution architect working in financial services or government / regulatory bodies
• Substantial experience of creating strategies, roadmaps and architectural delivery plans
• Experience working with formal architectural methodologies and frameworks
• Knowledge of working with architecture modelling tools
• Significant experience of working in with 3rd party or offshore suppliers
• Significant experience following development methodologies (e.g. Prince2, RUP, Scrum, Agile)

Essential

• Commercially aware, the ability to understand supplier proposals and promote cost effective solutions
• Relevant solution architecture skills (i.e. Cloud, Data, Application, and Infrastructure)
• Proven ability to innovate within a product stack whilst ensuring EA adherence
• Proficient knowledge of UML
• Good overall knowledge of a broad range of technology trends and industry standards in providing IT products as services and best practice application / solution / platform architectures
• Experience of managing architectural risk through the project lifecycle and during “run”

About the FCA
The FCA regulates the conduct of 50,000 firms in the UK to ensure our financial markets are honest, fair and competitive. We do this to make sure markets work well for individuals, businesses and the economy as a whole. For more information on what we do, our three-year strategy can be found
here.
The FCA’s Values & Diversity
Our ambition is to cultivate a culture of inclusion for all employees that respects their individual strengths, views, and experiences. We believe that our differences and similarities enable us to be a better organisation – one that makes better decisions, drives innovation, and delivers better regulation.
The FCA is committed to achieving greater diversity across all levels of the organisations. Given this, we particularly welcome applications from women, disabled and minority ethnic candidates for our Technical Specialist role.
Flexible working
We welcome applications from candidates who are looking for flexible arrangements. Many of our staff work flexibly including working part-time, staggered hours, and job shares. We can’t promise to give you exactly what you want but we won’t judge you for asking.
Multi-location
As part of the FCA’s on-going commitment to develop our national presence, most of our vacancies are now open to working in our Edinburgh, Leeds, or London offices. This means that as part of the application process you will be able to select your preference of which office location you would like to work from.
Useful information
Applications for this role close at 23:59 on 9th August 2024
This role is graded as Technical Specialist - Regulatory
Got a question?
If you are interested in learning more about the role please contact:
For internal applicants, please contact
michael.wood@fca.org.uk
For external applicants, please contact Asha Gladis at
asha.gladis@fca.org.uk
What to expect from our interview process
The assessment process consists of an initial screening call with one our Recruitment Partners. If successful, you will be invited to attend a first stage technical-based interview. The final stage will include competency-based questions
Application support
We want to remove any possible barriers and are committed to providing a wide range of reasonable adjustments so that you can keep the focus on your conversations and be at your best.
If you have an accessibility requirement, disability, or condition that means you might require changes to the recruitment process, please contact your recruiter to discuss this further. Our aim is to make your application as easy and comfortable as possible, and your recruiter will be happy to work with you to make any necessary arrangements where possible

What you will be doing (the role)

• Shaping the product roadmaps which identifies the scope, prioritisation and timeframes for delivery, including integration and specification of the products’ solution design as well as addressing technical debt
• Producing the technology and service architecture solutions, ensuring they align with enterprise product strategies and taking them through the relevant Design Authorities. The solutions will include consideration of capacity management, ITSCM, data governance, security, and software licensing requirements
• Review and quality assure artefacts created by external suppliers and internal teams ensuring the quality of the delivered solution to fulfil business and non-functional requirements and adhere to strategic vision for the product group and FCA
• Identifying opportunities for product innovation and shape design proposals for taking this forward; driving innovation at a product level where this delivers quick wins and business benefit and is in the boundary of the product roadmap
• Leading contributions to the relevant communities of practice, providing thought leadership, coaching and mentoring of other employees to build the overall business, technical and product architect capabilit

What you will get from the role

• Stimulating, innovative and experimental work to improve the collection of financial regulation data across the organisation
• Exposure to new ideas, opportunity to increase your knowledge and understanding of new technologies in Financial Regulation
• A sense of purpose in the job, knowing that your helping serve those in nee

We are a signatory to the Government’s Disability Confident scheme. This means that we will offer an interview to disabled candidates entering under the scheme, should they meet the minimum criteria for a role.

• Involvement as a solution architect working in financial services or government / regulatory bodies
• Substantial experience of creating strategies, roadmaps and architectural delivery plans
• Experience working with formal architectural methodologies and frameworks
• Knowledge of working with architecture modelling tools
• Significant experience of working in with 3rd party or offshore suppliers
• Significant experience following development methodologies (e.g. Prince2, RUP, Scrum, Agile