Head of Architecture

Salary: £100,000 - 100,000 per year

Requirements:

• Proven experience leading architecture functions within modern technology, SaaS or product-led organisations.
• Strong expertise in cloud-native architecture, ideally within AWS environments.
• Experience designing and governing scalable, distributed and serverless architectures.
• A strong understanding of modern software engineering practices and the ability to engage credibly with development teams.
• Experience working with technologies such as AWS Lambda, Route 53 and wider AWS platform services.
• Knowledge of observability, monitoring and platform reliability approaches, with exposure to tools such as Datadog being advantageous.
• Experience balancing technical excellence with commercial considerations, including scalability, performance and cost optimisation.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience leading and developing high-performing architecture or technical teams.
• A collaborative leadership style and a passion for continuous improvement.

Responsibilities:

• Define and evolve our architecture strategy, ensuring technology decisions align with business objectives, customer needs and long-term platform scalability.
• Provide technical leadership across cloud and solution architecture, driving the adoption of modern architectural patterns and engineering best practices.
• Lead architecture reviews and technical governance activities, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, resilient and commercially effective.
• Establish and maintain architectural standards, principles and technology roadmaps across the organisation.
• Champion modern cloud-native approaches and support the ongoing evolution of our technology platforms.
• Guide the architectural direction of Propel and associated products, ensuring they can scale effectively to support future business growth.
• Work closely with engineering teams to evaluate solution designs, technical approaches and implementation strategies.
• Support the successful delivery of new platform capabilities, integrations and international implementations.
• Drive continuous improvement across system performance, reliability, observability and operational excellence.
• Promote architecture decisions that balance customer experience, technical quality, speed of delivery and cost efficiency.
• Lead, coach and develop a multidisciplinary architecture and technical quality team, creating a culture of collaboration, innovation and continuous improvement.
• Build strong relationships across engineering, product and business teams, acting as a trusted technical advisor to senior stakeholders.
• Facilitate technical discussions and architecture forums, helping teams make informed decisions and align around shared objectives.
• Partner with internal and external delivery teams to ensure architectural consistency and high-quality outcomes.
• Maintain awareness of emerging technologies, industry trends and architectural approaches that could create value for us and our customers.
• Champion an AI-first mindset where appropriate, exploring opportunities to leverage modern technologies to improve products, platforms and engineering effectiveness.
• Drive conversations around technology innovation, helping shape future platform capabilities and architectural direction.

Technologies:

• AI
• AWS
• Lambda
• Cloud
• Datadog
• Support
• Serverless
• Architect
• Network

More:

We are CAVU, part of MAG, and we are building technology and hospitality solutions to make airport travel seamless and enjoyable for everybody. Our products include Propel, our revenue-accelerating single-platform technology, and world-class hospitality venues such as 1903 and Escape Lounges. This is a permanent Head of Architecture role based at Manchester Airport on a hybrid basis with 2 days per week onsite. We offer a supportive environment where you can think, grow and be authentic, along with benefits including 25 days holiday increasing to 28 with service, the option to buy up to 10 extra days, 4 flexible bank holidays, 10% company pension, annual bonus scheme, on-site gym, MediCash, flexible benefits and discounts, up to 50% off selected CAVU products, rail and retail discounts, 2 paid volunteering days per year, health and wellbeing events, learning opportunities, mentoring, learning grants and enhanced parental leave. We are committed to inclusion, flexibility and reasonable adjustments, and our colleague communities support a diverse and collaborative culture.

last updated 39 week of 2026