Senior Architect

England Source: WhatJobs

£70,000–£90,000

Overview

IRIS Software Group provides industry leading business critical software solutions and services to manage core business operations. We started 45 years ago with accountancy software and have evolved to be relied on by more than 100,000 customers across 135 countries in accountancy, education and business.

IRIS simplifies and automates critical workflows, allowing professionals in businesses and schools to focus on what they do best. Its software solutions and services for finance, HR and payroll teams, educational organisations, and accountancy firms helps comply with regulations, drive productivity and better engage with key stakeholders. Through simplifying, automating and providing insights on everyday mission-critical tasks for organisations of all shapes and sizes, IRIS ensures customers operate with confidence, backed by data-driven insights and dependable systems.

To see how IRIS helps organisations get things right first time, every time, visit IRIS Software Group pages or follow IRIS Software Group on social platforms.

Role Overview

As a Senior Architect on our Education product team, you’ll shape the technical vision and lead the end-to-end modernization of applications—many originally built before the cloud era—to operate as scalable, secure, cloud native solutions. You will partner with product, engineering, and architecture peers to drive roadmap, design, and governance across our cloud portfolio. You’ll be working with another Senior Architect and together looking after the Education solutions in Iris. The role reports to the Senior Director for Software Engineering in Education.

Responsibilities

Lead the end-to-end modernization of on-premises or monolithic applications, redesigning them as cloud native solutions (microservices, serverless, containers).
Define migration strategies—including phasing, data migration, and integration patterns—to move existing applications to public cloud platforms (Azure/AWS) with minimal disruption.
Develop proof of concepts for refactoring, containerization, and infrastructure as code approaches; validate performance, scalability, and cost efficiency improvements.
Architect services and features according to company cloud principles, ensuring they integrate seamlessly with modernized legacy systems.
Design fullstack, API-first solutions (UI, middle tier, data layer) that leverage event driven and multitier patterns to maximize resilience and extensibility.
Collaborate with Engineering and Product to translate business goals into a prioritized, agile delivery roadmap for both new and modernized services.

Governance, Quality & Security

Establish and enforce an architecture framework—covering standards, patterns library, security controls, and compliance requirements—for both legacy-refactored and cloud-native code.
Conduct regular architecture reviews and code-quality checkpoints; define KPIs/metrics to track maintainability, performance, and adherence to best practices.
Partner with Security and Operations to embed security-by-design into modernization efforts and cloud deployments.

Technical Leadership & Change Management

Mentor and guide cross-functional teams through significant technical transformations, removing blockers and managing cross-team dependencies.
Evangelize modern cloud and application modernization practices via workshops, brownbags, and internal documentation.
Continuously scan emerging technologies and frameworks that can accelerate modernization or improve system reliability and cost optimization.
Evangelize AI driven development in the teams and the wider Product and Engineering department.

Stakeholder Collaboration

Work closely with Development Managers to scope modernization projects, estimate effort, and align on delivery milestones.
Engage Product Owners to ensure modernization initiatives are appropriately prioritized alongside new feature development.
Liaise with Architecture Guild to evolve and maintain the architectural backlog, incorporating lessons learned from each migration engagement.

Key Relationships

Product team
Operations

Qualification

Must Have:

BSC or equivalent in a software engineering discipline, or relevant experience.
Architecture Certifications (Azure)

Experience

Must Have:

Multiple years of developing and architecting in cloud in AWS or GCP.
Familiarity with observability practices
Experience of designing full-stack architectures (multi-tier, so UI/UX, middle tier and persistence tier)
An API-first approach
Deep understanding of REST APIs
Understanding of different software design patterns e.g Multi-tier, Microservice, Event driven
Ability to explain complex concepts to diverse audiences