We are looking for an experienced, hands-on contract architect to support our Fabric platform engineering team. The role combines architecture leadership with practical delivery: shaping product direction, creating architecture blueprints, guiding engineering teams, reviewing code and, where useful, writing code or prototypes directly. The architect will work across platform products and reusable services as priorities evolve, with a strong focus on pragmatic delivery, secure design and engineering quality.

• Partner with Product Managers, Business Analysts and stakeholders to clarify outcomes, shape product vision and translate requirements into pragmatic architecture options.

• Produce concise architecture blueprints, high-level and low-level designs, technical decision records and implementation guidance for platform products.

• Design secure, scalable and reusable services, APIs, datastore patterns, integration approaches, UX-facing capabilities and common components.

• Work closely with engineering teams to turn architecture into implementation, including hands-on prototyping, code review, pair design, design assurance and technical debt management.

• Select appropriate technologies, promote reuse, define development standards and help create common frameworks or accelerators across the platform.

• Participate in planning and estimation, maintain the architecture backlog and make trade-offs across cost, risk, quality, security and time-to-market.

• Coordinate with other architects, security, platform and engineering teams to align designs with enterprise standards and delivery constraints.

• Apply AI-assisted and agentic engineering practices responsibly to improve delivery, quality, documentation, testing and developer productivity.

• Strong architecture experience across cloud-native application, integration, data and security domains, with the judgement to balance governance and delivery pace.

• Hands-on software engineering capability in at least one modern language such as C#, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript or Python, plus confidence reading and reviewing production code.

• Practical experience using agentic AI coding tools and AI-assisted delivery workflows, for example GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex-style agents or similar tools.

• Practical Azure experience, including compute, storage, networking, security, Azure Policy, Entra ID, RBAC, Key Vault and tenant-aware identity patterns.

• Experience with APIs, microservices, containers and Kubernetes, preferably AKS, plus CI/CD and DevSecOps practices using Azure DevOps and/or GitHub.

• Ability to design access management, authentication and authorisation patterns for users, services and platform-to-platform integrations.

• Good understanding of compliance, in-application security, secure-by-design patterns and operating within enterprise technology standards.

• Experience designing for reusability, maintainability, observability, cost optimisation and technical debt control.

• Clear communication style, able to work with senior stakeholders, product teams, engineers and architects across distributed teams.

• Experience with internal developer platforms, reusable engineering assets or platform marketplace models.

• Experience with generative AI solution patterns, retrieval-augmented generation, prompt evaluation, automated testing and AI governance guardrails.

• Familiarity with enterprise UX patterns, workflow automation and low-code/no-code product capabilities.

• Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Azure Security Engineer, TOGAF, SAFe or comparable architecture/security certification.

• Comfortable moving from strategy to code: can explain the architecture in a stakeholder meeting, then work with engineers on implementation details afterwards.

• Pragmatic rather than theoretical: makes sensible trade-offs, documents decisions clearly and keeps teams unblocked.

• Reuse-minded: looks for common patterns and components that can help multiple Fabric products, not just the immediate delivery need.

• Fluent in AI-enabled engineering, but grounded in security, reliability, maintainability and enterprise delivery standards.

Role type: Contract | Level: Architect / Senior Architect | Team: Fabric Platform Engineering