The Role
Own enterprise architecture assessments and target-state designs for complex legacy modernization programs. Define migration roadmaps, modernization guardrails, integration and data architecture standards, resilience requirements, and cloud-enabled platforms. Guide decomposition into microservices, APIs, and event-driven systems while supporting Kubernetes, DevSecOps, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, observability, governance, and hybrid deployments. Facilitate architecture reviews, manage risks, oversee implementation alignment, and maintain comprehensive architecture documentation across enterprise stakeholders.
Summary Generated by Built In
Location: London, UK Experience Level: 15–20 Years Department: Data & Technology ServicesAbout Us
Ascent has recently been acquired by Acuity Analytics. This is both a significant milestone for us and a tremendous opportunity for you.
Acuity Analytics is a business with a strong global reputation, an impressive client base, and ambitious growth plans. We deliver deep insights and domain-led digital transformation to high-growth and heavily regulated organisations. To our customers, we bring a partnership that provides the talent, technology, and capability to enhance performance and operational efficiency.
As part of our continued growth, we are looking for an Enterprise Architect to help shape the future of our engineering organisation and drive technical excellence across our modernization practice.
About the Role
This role is responsible for architecture assessment, target-state definition, and modernization alignment for complex enterprise application landscapes undergoing legacy transformation. You will focus on shaping scalable, resilient, secure, and governable architectures that progressively move monolithic, tightly coupled, batch-oriented systems toward modular, event-driven, cloud-enabled and operationally observable platforms.
The role requires strong hands-on architecture depth across application modernization, integration architecture, microservices, APIs, event streaming, container platforms, database modernization, DevSecOps, observability, resiliency, and governance. You will collaborate with business, application, data, infrastructure, security, DevOps, operations, and delivery teams to define transition roadmaps, manage architectural risks, establish guardrails, validate implementation choices, and ensure modernization is delivered through controlled, incremental, and enterprise-grade transformation practices.
Skills and Experience Required
Core Skills (must-have):
Nice to Have:
Key Competencies:
Certifications (Preferred):
What You Will Do
Why Join UsAt Acuity Analytics, you'll have the opportunity to work across complex enterprise Azure environments while helping shape and improve our Managed Services capability.
You'll solve challenging technical problems, influence standards and automation, mentor other engineers, and work closely with customers and technical teams.
People are at the Heart of our Business. By investing in people, we achieve exceptional results for our clients and create new opportunities for our teams to thrive.
Check out this page for more details.
For more details about Acuity Analytics please see here: Read here.
Ascent has recently been acquired by Acuity Analytics. This is both a significant milestone for us and a tremendous opportunity for you.
Acuity Analytics is a business with a strong global reputation, an impressive client base, and ambitious growth plans. We deliver deep insights and domain-led digital transformation to high-growth and heavily regulated organisations. To our customers, we bring a partnership that provides the talent, technology, and capability to enhance performance and operational efficiency.
As part of our continued growth, we are looking for an Enterprise Architect to help shape the future of our engineering organisation and drive technical excellence across our modernization practice.
About the Role
This role is responsible for architecture assessment, target-state definition, and modernization alignment for complex enterprise application landscapes undergoing legacy transformation. You will focus on shaping scalable, resilient, secure, and governable architectures that progressively move monolithic, tightly coupled, batch-oriented systems toward modular, event-driven, cloud-enabled and operationally observable platforms.
The role requires strong hands-on architecture depth across application modernization, integration architecture, microservices, APIs, event streaming, container platforms, database modernization, DevSecOps, observability, resiliency, and governance. You will collaborate with business, application, data, infrastructure, security, DevOps, operations, and delivery teams to define transition roadmaps, manage architectural risks, establish guardrails, validate implementation choices, and ensure modernization is delivered through controlled, incremental, and enterprise-grade transformation practices.
Skills and Experience Required
Core Skills (must-have):
- Enterprise Architecture
- Legacy Modernization
- Application Architecture
- Microservices Architecture
- Event-Driven Architecture
- API & Integration Architecture
- Cloud-Agnostic Architecture
- Domain-Driven Design
- Strangler Pattern Migration
- DevSecOps
- CI/CD & IaC
- Observability
- DataBricks
- Data Governance & Lineage
- Cloud Portability
- Kubernetes
- Kafka
- .NET
- MSSQL / PostgreSQL
Nice to Have:
- Financial Services / Banking Domain experience
Key Competencies:
- Proven enterprise architecture experience across large-scale legacy modernization, distributed systems, integration platforms, database ecosystems, cloud-enabled platforms, and regulated enterprise environments.
- Strong ability to assess monolithic, tightly coupled, database-centric and batch-driven estates and translate findings into practical target-state architecture and migration roadmaps.
- Deep understanding of microservices architecture, domain-driven design, service decomposition, database-per-service patterns, distributed workflows, sagas, APIs, and contract-first design.
- Strong knowledge of event-driven architecture, Kafka-based event streaming, schema management, asynchronous processing, replayability, idempotency, dead-letter handling, and integration resilience patterns.
- Hands-on architecture experience with Microsoft .NET ecosystems, REST / gRPC APIs, middleware platforms, enterprise messaging, MSSQL, PostgreSQL, and application modernization technologies.
- Strong understanding of cloud-agnostic and hybrid architecture principles including Kubernetes, Docker, containerized deployment, cloud portability, platform engineering, and workload isolation.
- Experience with DevSecOps, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, automated quality gates, release orchestration, environment promotion, vulnerability scanning, and audit-ready change management.
- Ability to define resilience and operational readiness requirements including high availability, disaster recovery, failover, observability, monitoring, logging, tracing, SLOs, incident handling, and support transition.
- Good appreciation of enterprise data platforms like Databricks, governed reporting, data lineage, data quality, auditability, regulatory evidence, and interaction between operational systems and analytical data platforms.
- Excellent stakeholder management, architecture governance, decision facilitation, risk articulation, technical communication, and cross-functional coordination skills.
- Ability to balance target-state architecture ambition with delivery pragmatism, coexistence constraints, incremental migration, business continuity, operational stability, and regulatory expectations.
- Strong documentation discipline across architecture blueprints, transition states, decision records, integration contracts, dependency maps, runbooks, governance artifacts, and executive-level architecture narratives.
Certifications (Preferred):
- TOGAF® Enterprise Architecture Practitioner / TOGAF® 9 Certified
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, or Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
What You Will Do
- Own enterprise architecture assessment and target-state definition for large-scale legacy modernization initiatives across application, integration, data, infrastructure, security, and operations domains.
- Assess current-state monolithic applications, shared database dependencies, batch processing models, middleware integrations, reporting dependencies, operational constraints, and resiliency gaps to define pragmatic modernization pathways.
- Define future-state architecture aligned to separation of concerns, microservices, database-per-service, API-led integration, event-driven processing, cloud portability, automated delivery, observability, and enterprise governance principles.
- Establish architecture guardrails, reference patterns, decision records, integration standards, data ownership principles, service boundary guidance, and non-functional requirements for scalable and resilient modernization delivery.
- Guide decomposition of tightly coupled legacy capabilities into domain-aligned services, reusable platform components, controlled interfaces, independently deployable modules, and governed operational workflows.
- Support migration strategy using incremental modernization patterns such as strangler migration, parallel run, coexistence, controlled cutover, rollback planning, reconciliation, and phased capability transition.
- Provide architecture direction for integration modernization across messaging, APIs, file-based interfaces, event streaming, schema governance, idempotent processing, error handling, retry mechanisms, and dead-letter handling.
- Partner with data architecture teams to align application modernization with governed data platforms, lineage, auditability, data quality, reporting readiness, and operational data consumption patterns.
- Drive architecture alignment across cloud, on-premise, and hybrid deployment models including Kubernetes, containerization, platform engineering, DevSecOps, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, secrets management, and environment readiness.
- Define and validate resilience, high availability, disaster recovery, failover, monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, operational readiness, and supportability requirements for business-critical enterprise platforms.
- Facilitate architecture governance forums, technical design reviews, solution walkthroughs, migration readiness assessments, risk reviews, and cross-team decision-making across delivery workstreams.
- Support implementation oversight during build, test, deployment, cutover, stabilization, and hyper-care phases to ensure solutions remain aligned with enterprise architecture guardrails and modernization objectives.
- Create and maintain architecture documentation including current-state assessments, target-state blueprints, transition architectures, integration views, dependency maps, decision logs, operational runbooks, and modernization roadmaps.
Why Join Us
You'll solve challenging technical problems, influence standards and automation, mentor other engineers, and work closely with customers and technical teams.
People are at the Heart of our Business. By investing in people, we achieve exceptional results for our clients and create new opportunities for our teams to thrive.
Check out this page for more details.
For more details about Acuity Analytics please see here: Read here.
Skills Required
- 15-20 years of professional experience
- Enterprise architecture experience across large-scale legacy modernization, distributed systems, integration platforms, database ecosystems, cloud-enabled platforms, and regulated enterprise environments
- Application architecture, microservices architecture, event-driven architecture, API and integration architecture, and domain-driven design
- Experience with legacy modernization patterns including the Strangler Pattern, parallel run, coexistence, controlled cutover, rollback, and phased migration
- Hands-on experience with Microsoft .NET, REST or gRPC APIs, middleware, enterprise messaging, MSSQL, and PostgreSQL
- Experience with Kafka-based event streaming, schema management, asynchronous processing, replayability, idempotency, retries, and dead-letter handling
- Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, containerized deployment, cloud portability, hybrid architecture, and platform engineering
- Experience with DevSecOps, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, automated quality gates, vulnerability scanning, and audit-ready change management
- Experience defining high availability, disaster recovery, failover, observability, monitoring, logging, tracing, SLOs, and operational readiness requirements
- Experience with Databricks, data governance, data lineage, data quality, governed reporting, and auditability
- Strong stakeholder management, architecture governance, decision facilitation, technical communication, and cross-functional coordination skills
- TOGAF Enterprise Architecture Practitioner or TOGAF 9 certification
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional or Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator certification
- Financial services or banking domain experience
Am I A Good Fit?
Get Personalized Job Insights.
Our AI-powered fit analysis compares your resume with a job listing so you know if your skills & experience align.
Success! Refresh the page to see how your skills align with this role.
The Company
What We Do
Ascent is a design-led software, data and cloud business that specialises in advanced analytics and AI. We design, build and manage cloud-native products, solutions, platforms and experiences on Azure. Our community of engineers, architects, data scientists, experience designers and consultants is here to help customers do something new, or do something better. Ascent is home to 450+ technology specialists across 5 key European locations (UK, Germany, Portugal, Malta and Bulgaria). Our talented, consultative teams deliver a range of solutions, from digital product and service design to mobile app development, API integrations, data engineering, AI and data science. Our modern app, data and infrastructure platforms help businesses leave legacy behind and enable rapid, efficient innovation
