Solution Architect

About the Role

Joining Griffiths Waite (GW) as a Solution Architect offers an outstanding opportunity for professional growth and impact.

At GW, we pride ourselves on strong engineering principles, forward-thinking use of AI, and a commitment to rapid, high-quality delivery — creating an ideal environment to shape solutions and influence outcomes.

We're looking for Solution Architects who are curious, commercially aware, and comfortable operating close to the client problem. You should bring strong technical breadth, clear communication, and a calm, structured approach to leading teams through complexity.

About Us

Griffiths Waite is a forward-thinking software company that specialises in creating innovative solutions for enterprise clients. Our mission is to design intuitive, user-centric digital products that deliver exceptional value and lasting impact.

Our core values define who we are:

• Brilliance – We move with purpose, innovate boldly, and simplify complexity to deliver high-impact results with clarity and speed.
• Trust – We build lasting relationships through integrity, transparency, and a deep commitment to our clients' best interests.
• Collaboration – We work together openly and supportively, believing that true success is a shared achievement.
• Ownership – We take responsibility for what we deliver, stay solution-focused, and always follow through on our promises.

If these values resonate with you, we'd love to hear from you.

What You'll Be Doing as a Solution Architect

As a Solution Architect at Griffiths Waite, you'll sit at the intersection of business, product, and engineering. You will shape end-to-end solutions for our enterprise clients, ensuring that what we design is both technically robust and tightly aligned to business outcomes.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Leading discovery and shaping work: clarifying objectives, mapping current state, and defining target architectures and solution options.
• Designing secure, scalable, and maintainable architectures across APIs, data, UI, and integration with enterprise systems.
• Working closely with product, engineering, and client stakeholders to translate business needs into clear technical roadmaps and delivery plans.
• Providing hands-on technical leadership to engineering teams: reviewing designs, unblocking complex problems, and ensuring good engineering practices.
• Making and documenting key architectural decisions, including trade-offs, constraints, and non-functional requirements.
• Helping clients understand the implications of architectural choices in plain language, building confidence and trust.
• Contributing to GW's internal engineering and architecture principles, and helping teams apply them consistently across engagements.

You may still be hands-on where it adds value (for example, defining reference implementations, spikes, or proof-of-concepts), but the core of the role is solution design, technical leadership, and stakeholder alignment rather than full-time coding.

What We Are Looking For – Skills

The ideal candidate brings strong technical breadth across application and data domains, with enough depth to guide good decisions and challenge assumptions.

Experience and knowledge that would be well suited to this role includes:

• Solid experience designing and delivering distributed systems and API-led solutions in an enterprise context.
• Practical understanding of modern engineering stacks, ideally including:
  • TypeScript / JavaScript
  • Node.js for API development (for example Fastify or Express)
  • Modern web frameworks such as React or Next.js
• Experience integrating with enterprise systems and a mix of relational and document databases (for example Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MongoDB).
• Familiarity with data solutions, such as data warehouses or data lakehouses, star-schema modelling, and data-pipeline patterns.
• Experience with Python for data processing, scripting, or prototyping data and AI solutions.
• Good grasp of non-functional requirements: performance, security, resilience, operability, and their impact on design.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and cloud deployment practices (Azure experience is a plus).

We're passionate about driving value with AI, so any experience designing solutions that integrate with LLMs, vector search, or other AI-enabled services is a strong bonus.

You do not need to be an expert in every technology we use, but you should be comfortable reasoning about trade-offs, asking the right questions, and guiding teams towards pragmatic, high-quality solutions.

What We're Looking For – Behaviours That Matter

We care as much about how you work as what you know. Behaviours we value include:

• A genuine curiosity to understand the client's business, constraints, and opportunities, not just the technology.
• Clear, confident communication: able to explain complex ideas simply to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• A collaborative, low-ego approach: you listen well, create space for others, and bring the team with you on decisions.
• Comfort with constructive challenge, both giving and receiving feedback as a normal part of doing good work.
• Strong ownership mindset: you think in terms of outcomes, are proactive about risks, and follow through on commitments.
• A desire to keep learning, stay current with modern architecture, data, and engineering practices, and share that learning with others.

What We Offer

• Salary up to £75,000 per annum, depending on experience.
• 25 days of annual leave plus all UK bank holidays.
• Competitive pension contribution.
• Private healthcare plan.
• Opportunity to work on innovative, high-impact projects with a talented cross-functional team.
• Professional development and training opportunities, including time for learning and knowledge sharing.
• Flexible working hours and hybrid/remote work options.
• A collaborative and supportive company culture where your voice matters.
• Strong client relationships with regular contact, giving you real influence on product and technology direction.
• Opportunities to shape our architecture practice and mentor engineers across a small, focused consultancy.
• Regular company celebrations (Summer and Christmas parties!).
• Gym and fitness studio.
• Office located 60 seconds from New Street Station – right in the heart of Birmingham city centre.