Lead Solution Architect

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Job Description:

We’re looking for a Lead Architect to shape the technology behind our Gas & Power Trading International (GPTI) business. This role sits across the full trading landscape — from front-office systems to back-office processing, data platforms, integrations and infrastructure.

You’ll take ownership of the technology roadmap across the trading technology estate, ensuring core platforms, modern digital services, integrations and data capabilities work together effectively while progressively reducing reliance on specialist knowledge of any single legacy system.

This is a senior individual contributor role. You’ll work closely with product teams, programme leaders and senior collaborators (including front office) to ensure our technology is aligned, scalable and fit for the future.

You’ll play a key role in modernising our estate — moving from legacy systems to more cloud-based and hybrid solutions — while keeping performance and reliability at the level required for real-time trading.

We’re also looking for someone who can spot opportunities to improve how we work, including the use of AI, automation and smarter workflows.

In this role, you’ll produce and guide key architecture outputs such as system designs, decision records, integration patterns and target-state architectures. You’ll help ensure everything meets our standards and is aligned with wider enterprise architecture.

In this role you will:

Architecture Strategy & Leadership

• Define and be responsible for the GPTI target architecture roadmap, encompassing core ETRM capabilities, surrounding trading systems, data platforms, market connectivity, risk and valuation engines, settlement, regulatory reporting and operational tooling.
• Provide strategic architectural leadership across programme workstreams, ensuring that use cases (improved valuation,, internal market and others) are architecturally coherent, reusable and aligned with bp's enterprise technology strategy.
• Establish and chair the GPTI Architecture Design Authority, governing all significant change through structured reviews, design challenges and sign-off gates.
• Influence and advise VP/SVP-level collaborators in Technology, Trading and Risk on technology investment decisions, build-vs-buy trade-offs and strategic platform direction.
• Shape the multi-year technology modernisation strategy, balancing continuity of critical trading operations with the ambition to adopt modular, cloud-native, event-driven and AI-augmented architectures that reduce reliance on legacy-platform specialism over time.

Trading Platform & ETRM Architecture

• Provide architectural leadership spanning the trading platform landscape, including ETRM, risk, scheduling, settlement, data and integration capabilities, with enough understanding of incumbent platforms to guide design choices while making the estate easier for broader engineering teams to understand, support and evolve.
• Guide platform upgrade, migration and containment strategies, ensuring backward compatibility, data integrity and minimal disruption to 24/7 trading operations while finding opportunities to move capability into cloud-native, vendor-neutral or shared platform services where appropriate.
• Govern COTS configuration vs. customisation decisions, ensuring the platform remains upgradeable, vendor-supportable and that custom development is minimised, isolated and justified through formal Architecture Decision Records (ARDs).
• Architect a flexible trading integration layer, designing API, event and messaging patterns that decouple market data services, clearing and settlement platforms, confirmations engines, scheduling/nominations systems and downstream analytics from platform-specific implementation details.
• Own non-functional requirement strategy for the trading technology estate, covering performance, scalability, high availability, disaster recovery, security and auditability for platforms supporting real-time trading across multiple European and international markets.

Broader Gas & Power Trading Systems Architecture

• Architect end-to-end front-to-back trading workflows, from deal capture and position management through risk analytics (VaR, Greeks, Monte Carlo, stress testing), P&L attribution, settlement, invoicing, confirmations and regulatory reporting (REMIT, EMIR, MiFID II, ACER).
• Design and govern the market connectivity architecture, covering exchange connectivity, broker interfaces, electronic trading platforms, TSO/DSO nomination interfaces and real-time price feeds.
• Lead the gas & power scheduling and nominations architecture, ensuring robust, automated and compliant connectivity with European gas balancing systems, power scheduling platforms and transmission system operators.
• Define the risk and valuation platform architecture, including curve management, model calibration, scenario generation, exposure calculation and integration with front-office decision-support tools.
• Architect the data landscape for gas & power trading, including canonical data models (CDM), data mesh/fabric patterns, master data management, data lineage, analytics platform integration (Foundry/Palantir) and alignment with enterprise Data Office policies across 120+ CDM groupings.

Cloud, Integration & Modern Architecture

• Lead the cloud and hybrid architecture strategy for GPTI, advising on the evolution of on-premise, vendor and custom-built trading systems into cloud-hosted or hybrid environments (AWS / Azure) while maintaining performance SLAs.
• Design enterprise integration architecture, covering API management, event-driven patterns (Kafka, EventBridge), messaging (JMS, MQ), ETL/ELT pipelines, microservices and service mesh topologies.
• Champion AI, ML and agentic automation opportunities within the trading technology estate — including intelligent scheduling, anomaly detection, automated P&L attribution, predictive maintenance and agentic workflow orchestration (e.g., AWS AgentCore).
• Define and govern DevOps, platform engineering and observability standards, including CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes), monitoring, alerting and incident response architecture.

People, Community & Governance

• Mentor and develop the architecture community within GPTI and the wider ST&S portfolio, coaching junior architects, technical leads and senior developers to raise the overall architectural capability of the function.
• Represent GPTI in enterprise-level architecture forums, ensuring alignment with bp Digital's technology strategy, cloud adoption frameworks, security policies and Technology Control Framework.
• Engage at a senior level with vendor technical leadership (ION, Trayport, ICE, Palantir, AWS) on product roadmap alignment, licensing strategy, technical issues and joint innovation opportunities.
• Produce and maintain senior-level architectural artefacts, including C4 models (Context, Container, Component, Code), target-state blueprints, data flow mappings, Key Design Decisions, ARDs and technology lifecycle assessments.

What you will need to be successful:

• Extensive experience in technology roles within energy trading, commodity trading or capital markets, with at least 8 years in a senior architecture or technical leadership position.
• Strong understanding of enterprise trading platforms and ETRM concepts, including trade lifecycle workflows, configuration principles, integrations, simulation or valuation concepts and data architecture, with the ability to work effectively with specialist SMEs where deep platform expertise is required.
• Proven ability to reduce dependency on specialist legacy-platform skills, through target-state architecture, service decomposition, integration abstraction, documentation, engineering standards, automation and capability uplift across wider delivery teams.
• Comprehensive knowledge of European and international gas and power markets, covering physical and financial trading, forward/futures/options, basis risk, spark and dark spreads, gas balancing, power scheduling, nominations, LNG and cross-commodity optimisation.
• Proven track record of defining and delivering enterprise-level architecture for front-to-back trading platforms, including trade capture, risk management (VaR, Greeks, Monte Carlo, stress testing), P&L attribution, settlement, confirmations and regulatory reporting.
• Expert understanding of integration architecture in high-performance trading environments — including messaging (JMS, MQ, Kafka), API design (REST, GraphQL, gRPC), event-driven patterns, ETL/ELT, real-time market data connectivity and STP workflows.
• Strong data architecture expertise, including canonical data models, data mesh/fabric concepts, master data management, data lineage, data quality and experience aligning with enterprise Data Office governance frameworks.
• Significant experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred, Azure), including infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS/EKS), serverless patterns and hybrid cloud architectures for latency-sensitive trading workloads.
• Strong commercial awareness and collaborator management capability, with demonstrated experience influencing VP/SVP-level decision-makers across technology, trading, risk and operations functions.
• Experience producing and governing enterprise architecture artefacts such as C4 models, ArchiMate diagrams, target-state blueprints, ARDs, NFR strategies and data flow diagrams.
• Experience with regulatory and compliance technology, including REMIT, EMIR, MiFID II and ACER reporting requirements and their architectural implications for trading systems.

Qualifications & Architecture Certifications

A relevant degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems. The following architecture certifications are desirable and will be considered favourably:

• TOGAF 9 or 10 Certified / Practitioner — The Open Group Architecture Framework
• AWS Solutions Architect – Professional or Associate — Amazon Web Services

At bp, we support our people to grow in a diverse and exciting environment. We believe that our team is strengthened by diversity.

There are many aspects of our employees’ lives that are meaningful, so we offer benefits to enable your work to fit with your life. These benefits can include flexible working options, a generous paid parental leave policy, excellent retirement benefits, among others!

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.

Reinvent your career as you help our business meet the challenges of the future.

Apply now!

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We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of protected characteristics like race, religion, color, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, veteran status or disability status. Individuals with an accessibility need may request an adjustment/accommodation related to bp’s recruiting process (e.g., accessing the job application, completing required assessments, participating in telephone screenings or interviews, etc.). If you would like to request an adjustment/accommodation related to the recruitment process, please contact us.

If you are selected for a position and depending upon your role, your employment may be contingent upon adherence to local policy. This may include pre-placement drug screening, medical review of physical fitness for the role, and background checks.