About Bud
Established in 2016, Bud is the next generation SaaS platform, supporting some of the largest organisations in the skills development and apprenticeship training sector. With over 70,000 users and growing year on year, backed by venture capital, we are on an exciting journey, to expand our client base throughout the UK.
At Bud, we’re passionate and proud to be engineering a solution that will enable more and more learners to access consistent, high-quality training and for training providers to maximise their business opportunities. Our customers love Bud because it enables them to drive up the quality of their training delivery at scale whilst reducing costs.
As innovators, we’re constantly looking for new ways to improve training and learner outcomes through technology, and we’re working on a number of exciting new product areas right now.
This is a great time to be joining the business as we continue to flourish with strong revenue growth and increasing our workforce.
Working at Bud
We have a strong leadership team and a clear vision that has been translated into a sound business strategy: Each department aligning their strategic direction to the overarching organisational goals.
We are supportive and collaborative, working together to create a unique culture, where people thrive and build rewarding careers. We share a work ethic that provides the perfect blend of autonomy, professionalism and accountability, with a desire to have fun along the way.
Bud operates a hybrid working model. We believe in striking the right balance between remote and office working, ensuring connected teams, forging internal relations, whilst allowing our colleagues to do their best work both from home and our main office in Berkeley Square, Bristol.
The Role
As Solution Architect, you will lead and own Bud’s technical vision for its industry-leading training management platform. You will be responsible for Technical, Application, and Data Architecture across our solution set, and act as Design Authority on how the solution will be delivered, whilst providing hands-on technical leadership across several development teams.
Helping to bridge the gap between Technical and Product strategy, you will lead the team in finding the best tech solutions to meet product requirements and solve business problems, defining a clear vision and strategy that the team can implement with conviction. With excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, you will also be highly capable of clearly articulating approach, rationale, and benefits to Bud colleagues at all levels.
You will engage across the teams, collaborating on the roadmap to clearly define the best-fit solution architecture for all aspects of the Bud platform as it evolves. With quality, security, scalability, and maintainability a constant consideration, you will work with the teams to drive technical decisions, define technical solutions, assist in the scoping and sizing of work, and provide oversight to ensure technical delivery in accordance with agreed plans/outcomes and adherence to defined standards, principles and best practices.
As a key player in our investor-backed business, with an understanding of the different pressures that brings, you will help drive future business growth, maintaining a deep understanding of customer needs and wider industry direction, and ensuring that our technical vision delivers a platform on which our customers businesses can thrive.
Key accountabilities
- Architecture & Design
- Ownership of the Architecture of Bud’s cloud-based, multi-tenant platform and wider product set.
- Responsible for Technical, Application and Data Architecture and act as Design Authority for Bud’s solution set and related technologies, along with ownership of associated governance mechanisms.
- Collaborate with the Product and Technology teams to define and own technical solutions for roadmap items, defining and documenting architectural patterns and solution designs for applications and services.
Technical Leadership
- Provide architectural direction and lead technical decision making, working with the teams to define the best-fit solutions in line with Buds’ technical vision, making strategic technology choices, ensuring alignment with business goals and long-term scalability.
- Ensuring technical solutions are clearly defined, estimated, understood, and documented by the delivery teams.
- Work alongside the delivery teams providing oversight, guidance, and support to ensure technical delivery in line with agreed outcomes and adhering to defined standards, principles and best practices.
- Prioritise and guide the work of the Platform Improvement Team, ensuring alignment with architectural goals and technical strategy.
- Keeping abreast of technology trends or emerging technologies, assessing their relevance to the business, and recommending opportunities to drive innovation.
Mentorship and Collaboration
- Act as mentor to development team members, driving architectural awareness in the team.
- Ability to navigate conflicting views in the team and lead technical decision making to deliver outcomes the team can implement with conviction.
- Proactively collaborate with the Product team, QA engineers, DevOps, and wider business stakeholders.
- Engage with existing clients and in pre-sales processes to ensure customer needs are clearly understood and that Bud’s technical vision remains aligned with meeting and exceeding their business needs.
- Support continuous improvement initiatives across the technology team and broader delivery function.
Experience
Bud’s Product is constantly evolving and you will need to have a solid technical background in related technologies to be able to architect the best solutions and lead technical decision making in the team. Alongside strong technical leadership, design principles and architectural experience, you will have excellent communication and stakeholder management skills and a technical background, ideally with experience in the following:
- Strong background in software engineering using a MS technology stack
- Deep expertise in .NET Core / .NET 6+, C#, and modern backend development
- Strong knowledge of Azure services, including App Services, Service Bus, Key Vault, and Cosmos DB
- Proven experience designing microservices, APIs, and event-driven systems
- Practical understanding of CI/CD, containerisation, and orchestration
- Familiarity with design patterns, domain-driven design (DDD), and system decomposition
- Front-end architecture experience with Angular or similar
- Understanding of data architecture – both SQL and NoSQL approaches
- Reporting and data warehousing/ADF
- Agile software development practices and working with cross-functional delivery teams
- Demonstrated success in delivering cloud-native solutions
The Team
Reporting to the CTO, you will be a key member of the Technology leadership team, working at the heart of the group responsible for technology, delivery, and platform operations at Bud.
You will work closely with members of the Development and Delivery teams, driving technical decision making, along with colleagues from Product and the wider business on a day-to-day basis.
Our values and culture
At Bud, we strive to build a culture rooted in our core values.
Accountability is key, with each team member taking ownership of their contributions, fostering trust and dependability across the organisation.
We promote c ollaborative teamwork through open communication and mutual support, ensuring that ideas are shared freely, and everyone’s voice is heard and valued.
Our commitment to excellence means we consistently push for continuous improvement, setting and achieving high standards, and celebrating our successes along the way.
Passion fuels our efforts, driving us to pursue our goals with dedication, energy, and enthusiasm.
We also embrace an entrepreneurial mindset, cultivating a culture of innovation where new ideas are welcomed, and calculated risks are taken to achieve growth.
What’s in it for you?
- Hybrid working
- 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays)
- Additional day Birthday leave.
- +1 day leave for each year length of service up to 4 extra days
- Purchase up to 5 days leave per year
- Enhanced company contributory pension scheme
- 4 x Salary Life Assurance
- Private healthcare
- Subsidised dental care plan
- Eye Care Plan
- Head Office gym, free breakfast and lunch once a month. Office beer fridge!
- Free Nero Coffee once a week, free cinema and film tickets, up to 50% discount on sporting brands plus other offers through the Healthcare (subject to criteria)
- Cycle to work scheme.
- Employee welfare scheme
- Company socials
- Enhanced maternity and paternity pay
Job Types: Full-time, Permanent
Pay: Up to £85,000.00 per year
Please note: We do not currently offer UK visa sponsorship.
Please submit your CV to be considered for this position.
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