Solutions Architect

Reporting to: Head Of Innovation & Architecture 

Location: UK remote

Liberis is transforming business finance. We use the latest technology to make it simple and flexible for small businesses to secure funding. Since our inception we have helped more than 15,000 small businesses access over £390 million in funding. We believe that small businesses are the economic lifeblood of local communities, yet they continue to be underserved by traditional banks and financial services organisations. We are committed to supporting them by:

• Offering simple, fair finance to small businesses to help them thrive
• Providing easy access to flexible funding through our innovative technology platform
• Empowering our partners with finance solutions to increase the lifetime value of their small business customers.

We are in a very exciting period of growth, both within the UK and internationally, with teams based in London, Nottingham, USA and Scandinavia. As we continue to grow we are looking for talented and ambitious individuals to join us to reshape business finance and continue to support our partners and customers in the underserved SME market.

We are proud to have been included in The Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100 as one of the 100 fastest growing FinTechs in the UK for two years running.

Liberis was born with a strong purpose and it’s at the heart of who we are today. 

Behind our technology is a really strong and united team, dedicated to helping our partners have the positive impact on businesses that we all want to see. 

Most of us are driven by the idea of helping businesses grow and achieve their ambitions.
Some of us just love creating technology that solves a problem. Either way, we believe in what we do, and we enjoy doing it. We’re particularly proud to have been formally recognised by Great Place To Work as one of the UK’s Best (Medium) Workplaces, as well as the 3rd Best (Medium) Workplace For Women and a centre of Excellence For Wellbeing. 

The team behind the technology

Technology is at the heart of Liberis’ growth and as part of the Innovation Team you will have a big part to play in achieving our mission: To give every business access to funding. In doing so we strive to be the best in class, not only in how we achieve our mission technologically, but also in providing our customers and partners an optimal user journey and integration experience.
We are serious about Scrum, continuous deployment and continuous integration. Insights gained for real customer experiences help us continuously improve their online experience and optimize our partner integrations.
We are an agile team that has proven to be fully equipped to deal with the recent major shift in working structure and environment, meaning we can support remote or part-remote working and trust our colleagues to take ownership for their role. Therefore we encourage flexibility and finding a working structure that fits for both you and the team.

Who are you?

You’re technologically flexible, responsible for designing process and technology architecture across multiple disciplines including Engineering, Business Intelligence and Business Technology.

You’re used to working in a highly collaborative team, working closely with the team lead to guide business direction and provide scalable solutions to real world problems.

You’re ready to work closely with and learn from skilled functional heads in their respective disciplines to seamlessly connect solutions between them.

You promote high levels of security at every level of your architecture, with an emphasis an internal network security, OAuth flows, K8s network policies and API resilience.

You’re a great communicator with experience in managing external partners and stakeholder requirements.

You’re creative in displaying and sharing your approaches with the wider business through intuitive documentation and diagramming.

We think you'll need?

• A comprehensive background in software product delivery, preferably with development experience.
• A strong grasp of software design patterns, non-functional requirements and system integration approaches.
• A broad range of hands-on technical knowledge with the ability to share this equally well to business and technical audiences.
• Experience in both front end and back end infrastructure, design and approaches.
• A team oriented, collaborative and open-minded approach to your work.
• A broad and strong understanding of design, configuration, resilience, operations, DR, availability, logging, monitoring, security, performance and deployments in a cloud environment.
• Experience of leading organisational change programmes, bringing multiple teams together to unlock scaling opportunities
• A collaborative, humble and pragmatic approach and are used to dealing with business stakeholders at every level.
• Experience working in a fast-paced agile environment and be able to pivot accordingly.
• Experience with agile methodologies and ceremonies.
• Personable and confident in supporting and explaining your, and your teams’, solutions, including describing assumptions, constraints and trade-offs.
• Experience in diagram and documentation tools, Miro, Lucidchart, Confluence etc.
• Strong leadership skills, able to guide conversation with internal and external stakeholders.
• Advanced understanding of business analysis and requirement approaches.

It would be advantageous if you have:

• Experience in .NET, NodeJS, React frameworks.
• Experience in both SQL and NoSQL databases, and a solid understanding of where they are appropriate.
• Knowledge and experience with Azure DevOps and Azure Pipelines, Kubernetes and AKS.
• A background in software architecture and any architecture-related certifications or qualifications.

What will you be doing here?

• We are looking for a hands-on Solution Architect with a pragmatic approach to solving business problems.
• You’ll communicate directly with external stakeholders to deeply understand their business requirements for their benefit and the benefit of our multi-tenanted platform.
• You will rapidly get up to speed on the current state of Liberis’ technical estate.
• You’ll work alongside Engineers, Functional leads, QA and Support teams to ensure the platform services/APIs are well designed, scalable and manageable throughout their lifecycles.  
• You’ll enable our engineers to deliver in a productive, scalable, available, and secure way.
• You’ll be responsible for ensuring that the platform remains compliant with the demands and standards set by our Infosec and Compliance teams.
• You’ll be communicating your teams’ solutions to stakeholders and working closely with our product teams to scope epics and refine approaches for teams to consume.
• You’ll ensure that approaches and services are monitored, logged and are suitably resilient.
• You will coach business leaders on the technical state of the art and help them build strategies that maximise the return on investment in technology.
• You will mentor technical colleagues, empowering them to make good decisions grounded in best practices while cultivating the next generation of architects.

What we can offer you?

Health

• Company wellbeing programme – running club, nutritionist sessions, free fruit and
  healthy snacks, mental health framework
• Health insurance
• Eyecare vouchers
• Flu jabs

Wealth

• Company pension scheme
• Life insurance
• Performance related bonus
• Financial wellbeing initiatives
• Salary sacrifice schemes for Cycle to Work and Technology purchases
• Season Ticket Loan
• Charitable giving

Lifestyle

• Generous holiday entitlement including an extra 3 days holiday to cover the
  Christmas period
• Flexible working
• Team away days
• Regular company socials

What happens next?

Think this sounds like the right next move for you? If you’re not completely confident that you fit our exact criteria, get in touch! Humility is a wonderful thing and we are interested in hearing about what you can add to Liberis. You can reach us at [email protected] - we look forward to chatting with you!

Please note that unfortunately Liberis is unable to provide visa sponsorship to candidates without full rights to work within the UK (Tier 2 or Tier 5). This is something we are looking in to and hope to be able to offer this option in the future, though kindly request that candidates only apply if they have full rights to work in the UK.