Cloud Architect (Azure & GCP)

Location: Canary Wharf or Liverpool Street, London (Hybrid – 3 days onsite)

Role Summary

I'm seeking a hands-on Cloud Architect to accelerate a major cloud transformation and application modernisation programme. This role blends cloud architecture, engineering leadership, and governance in a regulated banking environment.

The client is open to a senior engineer stepping into an architect role or a junior architect comfortable delivering both engineering and architectural responsibilities. This flexibility is essential: the teams you will support are still maturing, and despite the introduction of a self‑service cloud adoption portal, they will rely heavily on your guidance.

You will define and implement Azure and GCP architectures, support migration of legacy applications, modernise core banking platforms, and ensure cloud solutions meet regulatory, operational, and security requirements.

Key Responsibilities

🌐 Cloud Strategy & Architecture

• Define target architectures for cloud adoption and application modernisation.
• Develop Azure and GCP reference architectures, patterns, and standards.
• Align cloud platform capabilities with business, regulatory, and operational needs.
• Provide architectural leadership across transformation programmes.

🔧 Application Modernisation

• Assess legacy applications and define migration strategies:
• Rehost
• Replatform
• Refactor
• Cloud‑native transformation
• Support adoption of PaaS/SaaS aligned with the target operating model.
• Partner with engineering teams to modernise applications using cloud‑native technologies.

🏗 Platform Engineering

• Collaborate with platform engineering to deliver secure, scalable cloud platforms.
• Drive IaC adoption using Terraform and native tooling.
• Support automation, CI/CD, observability, and reliability initiatives.
• Define standards for networking, identity, security, monitoring, and resilience.

🔐 Governance & Security

• Ensure solutions comply with banking regulatory requirements.
• Work with Security Architecture and Risk teams to embed secure‑by‑design principles.
• Define controls for:
• Identity & Access Management
• Data protection & encryption
• Network segmentation
• Disaster recovery
• Operational resilience

👥 Stakeholder Management

• Engage senior technology and business stakeholders.
• Present designs to governance boards.
• Provide technical guidance to development, platform, infrastructure, and operations teams.

Required Skills & Experience

☁ Cloud Platforms

• Strong architecture + engineering experience across Azure and GCP.
• Designing enterprise‑scale multi‑cloud environments.

🔵 Azure Expertise

• Landing Zones
• AKS
• App Services
• Functions
• API Management
• Networking
• Monitor
• Entra ID (Azure AD)

🟡 GCP Expertise

• GKE
• Cloud Run
• Compute Engine
• BigQuery
• Cloud Storage
• VPC & Networking
• IAM
• Logging & Monitoring

🧩 Architecture & Engineering

• Cloud‑native patterns
• Microservices & API‑led architectures
• Event‑driven architectures
• Kubernetes & containerisation
• Terraform IaC
• CI/CD & DevOps
• Hybrid‑cloud & multi‑cloud integrations

🔒 Security & Compliance

Experience in regulated financial services environments, including:

• Operational resilience
• Cloud security frameworks
• Data governance
• EBA outsourcing considerations
• Risk management & architecture governance

Desirable Experience

• Investment banking, wholesale banking, or capital markets.
• Transaction monitoring, risk, finance, regulatory reporting, or data platforms.
• Cloud migration factory approaches.
• Databricks and modern data platforms.
• AI, analytics, and data engineering workloads.
• Azure/GCP architecture certifications.