Technical Architect

Company Description

Fastmarkets is an industry-leading price-reporting agency (PRA) and information provider for global commodities, providing price data, news, analytics and events for the agriculture, forest products, metals and mining and new-generation energy markets.

Fastmarkets' data is critical for customers seeking to understand and predict dynamic, sometimes opaque markets, enabling trading and risk management. Fastmarkets is a global business with a history dating back to 1865 and is built on trust and deep market knowledge. It has more than 700 employees spread across global locations in the UK, US, China, India, Singapore, Brazil, Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland and beyond.

Job Description

The Role

This is a newly created role, established to give Product Engineering dedicated architectural leadership and to build a genuine technical specialist career pathway alongside Fastmarkets' existing management track.

You will own solution architecture and technical strategy for Product Engineering - providing technical direction across its squads, setting design standards, and ensuring solutions are built to be scalable, resilient, and secure. This includes architectural ownership of Product Engineering's major programmes and projects, where you may be embedded in delivery on a part-time or full-time basis depending on the scale, complexity, and risk of the work. Alongside this, you will hold shared accountability - in partnership with the Head of AI Enablement, Head of Data Platform, and Cloud Architect - for driving AI-enabled product development lifecycle (PDLC) practice across Product Engineering, Data & AI, and Cloud Engineering, fostering a cross-organisation community of best practice while ensuring Product Engineering's own domain-specific AI use cases are addressed.

This is a highly cross-functional role. You will work closely with engineering, data, cloud, and product teams to standardise, govern, and mature how Fastmarkets designs and delivers software - and you will help define what a technical specialist career path looks like at Fastmarkets, acting as a role model for that path yourself.

Principal Accountabilities

Solution Architecture & Technical Strategy

• Own solution architecture and technical strategy for Product Engineering across its squads
• Provide technical direction on major projects, ensuring solutions are scalable, flexible, resilient, and secure
• Provide hands-on architectural leadership to major product programmes - embedding into a delivery team on a part-time or full-time basis where the scale, complexity, or risk of the work requires it
• Work alongside programme managers and product owners to keep architectural decisions, delivery sequencing, and technical dependencies aligned
• Act as the technical escalation point for cross-squad architectural decisions

Cross-Organisation Standardisation & Governance

• Drive standardisation, governance, and specialisation practice across Product Engineering, Data & AI, and Cloud Engineering - working directly with the relevant groups in each organisation
• Partner with Cloud Engineering's architecture capability and Data & AI's platform architecture on cross-org technical decisions
• Provide technical oversight of third-party delivery partners, vendors, and systems integrators - reviewing their designs and implementation against Fastmarkets' architecture standards and holding them to those standards

AI-Enabled PDLC

• Co-own, with the Head of AI Enablement, Head of Data Platform, and Cloud Architect, the community of best practice for AI-enabled PDLC across the three organisations
• Ensure Product Engineering's domain-specific AI use cases are identified, prioritised, and addressed as part of the shared PDLC model
• Champion the use of AI-assisted development tools and practice across Product Engineering

Specialist Career Pathway

• Own and define the specialist career pathway this role is designed to anchor
• Establish the levels and capabilities that distinguish deep technical specialists, giving engineers a credible alternative to the people-management track

KEY INTERFACES

• Director of Engineering, Product Engineering
• Head of AI Enablement
• Head of Data Platform
• Cloud Architect / Cloud Engineering
• Product Engineering squads and leads
• Product counterparts within Product Engineering
• Product owners and programme / delivery managers
• Third-party delivery partners, vendors, and systems integrators
• Enterprise Architect

Qualifications

We recruit talented, dynamic people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, all united by a belief in our mission to provide the world’s leading and most trusted price reporting, events, and intelligence service for the markets we serve. We’re proud to be an equal opportunities employer and are committed to creating a fully inclusive workplace, where everyone feels able to participate and contribute meaningfully.

If you are open-minded, curious, resilient, solutions-oriented and committed to promoting equality, then read on.

KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS

We're looking for a technical architect who combines strong direction-setting and cross-team leadership with genuine technical credibility, across both traditional solution architecture and AI-enabled delivery. This role is weighted toward architecture, standards, and driving alignment across teams rather than full-time hands-on building - but you should have enough hands-on experience to set credible standards, review architecture critically, and know the difference between what sounds good in a slide and what actually survives production.

Key Experience / Qualifications

• 12+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years operating at architecture or senior technical leadership level
• Proven experience as a solution architect or technical architect, setting technical direction and design standards across multiple teams or squads
• Strong software architecture fundamentals: distributed systems, microservices, API design, service-oriented architecture, and cloud-native patterns (Fastmarkets runs primarily on Microsoft Azure)
• Experience defining or contributing to technical standards, governance, and engineering best practice across multiple teams - able to drive alignment without direct authority over every team involved
• Experience acting as architect on large, multi-team product programmes - working with programme managers and product owners, and holding third-party suppliers or systems integrators to defined architecture standards
• Track record of taking AI/GenAI capabilities from prototype through to reliable, monitored production systems
• Solid understanding of agentic or multi-agent AI system design (orchestration patterns, tool use, agent coordination) and the operational realities of running them in production
• Working knowledge of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) - ingestion, chunking, embeddings, vector search, and production retrieval pipelines
• Track record of leading or significantly influencing an AI-enabled product development lifecycle (PDLC) - embedding AI into how software gets built, not just what gets built
• Comfortable operating at both ends of the spectrum: credible in architecture conversations with senior technical and business stakeholders, and able to engage in technical detail when needed
• Strong communicator, able to bring multiple engineering teams and disciplines (Product Engineering, Data & AI, Cloud Engineering) toward shared technical direction

Personal Attributes

• Deeply technical, with genuine hands-on credibility - leads through technical judgement, not just process
• Strategic thinker who can translate broad technical direction into concrete, achievable standards and practice
• Highly collaborative; able to drive alignment across teams without formal authority over them
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity - this is a newly created role and part of the job is helping to shape it
• Results-driven, with a focus on long-term technical health and career pathway impact, not just individual delivery

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE (First 6 Months)