Lead Solutions Architect (Legacy to Cloud)

Overview

In this role you drive architectural direction for a defined migration workstream within a large legacy-to-cloud programme. You will align workstream designs with governance, security, and hosting constraints while coordinating discovery, design, and cutover activities. You work closely with cloud, hosting, security, and client teams to ensure a safe, predictable migration of a diverse estate. This is a leadership-focused, governance-driven opportunity on a significant data-centre exit project.

Responsibilities

• Own the architectural direction for all applications and components within the workstream, aligned to programme standards
• Act as single point of technical decision-making and design governance across the workstream
• Provide leadership to Architects to maintain technical clarity and consistency
• Ensure comprehensive discovery for all services within the workstream
• Consolidate discovery into a coherent architecture view (dependencies, integrations, constraints)
• Validate assumptions and feed findings into migration design
• Define migration approach per service (re-host, re-platform, relocate, uplift) with Lead Platform Architect
• Ensure designs reflect security, IAM, network, storage, monitoring, and operational readiness
• Oversee creation and quality assurance of migration design docs per application
• Identify and manage cross-application dependencies
• Coordinate with delivery management to plan sequencing and readiness across components
• Engage legacy SMEs to understand constraints and remediation needs
• Provide technical oversight during migration execution and cutover events
• Support troubleshooting and issue resolution during execution
• Ensure cutover readiness, rollback planning, and operational acceptance criteria
• Represent the workstream in governance forums
• Manage workstream-level technical risks, issues, decisions, and assumptions
• Provide clear technical updates to programme leadership

Key requirements

• Proven experience as an architect on large-scale legacy data centre exit or cloud transition programmes
• Strong architectural knowledge of legacy on-premise hosting and migration to Cloud or similar environments
• Experience with legacy technologies: Java, Oracle, WebLogic, IIS, Windows/Linux, AIX, Solaris, COBOL, GEN
• Experience defining migration approaches and leading technical teams through discovery, design, and cutover
• Understanding of platform-level requirements: networking, IAM/security, access patterns, storage, resilience, monitoring
• Ability to manage complex technical dependencies and coordinate multiple engineering teams
• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills with senior client SMEs and multi-supplier teams
• Experience operating within architectural governance and programme-level technical controls
• Occasional weekend work for planned deployment/cutover

• Strong communication
• Stakeholder engagement
• Cross-team collaboration
• Migration patterns and sequencing
• Discovery to design governance
• Security and IAM considerations

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