Lead solution architect
Job description
Original text imported from Reed
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Technology
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Job Description:
Our purpose is to deliver energy to the world, today and tomorrow. For over 100 years, bp has focused on discovering, developing, and producing oil and gas in the nations where we operate. We are one of the few companies globally that can provide governments and customers with an integrated energy offering. Delivering our strategy sustainably is fundamental to achieving our ambition to be a net zero company by 2050 or sooner.
Let me tell you about the role:
The AWS Platform Architect is responsible for defining, evolving, and governing the architecture of bp’s AWS cloud platform. This role sets the strategic technical direction for AWS within bp, ensuring the platform is consistent, secure, scalable, intelligent, and aligned with bp’s broader enterprise architecture principles. Broader cloud service provider architecture experience is valuable to bring wider perspective and support enterprise alignment where needed, but the primary focus of this role is AWS cloud platform architecture.
Working closely with the Head of AWS Platform, Platform Engineering teams, and peer technology domains, this role translates strategy into a clear platform architecture roadmap and set of standards that enable product and application teams to build and run workloads effectively on AWS.
A key aspect of this role is maintaining strong technical credibility through hands-on engagement with AWS services and emerging cloud-native and AI capabilities. The AWS Platform Architect is expected to actively evaluate, prototype, and pilot AWS and AI-enabled services to ensure architectural decisions are grounded in real implementation experience, not theory alone.
The role acts as a senior architectural authority for AWS within bp, influencing across multiple teams and domains, and ensuring that AWS platform capabilities are delivered as a coherent, reusable enterprise product.
Why this role matters:
The AWS Platform Architect plays a critical role in ensuring bp’s AWS platform is not just a collection of services, but a coherent, well-governed, AI-enabled enterprise capability. This role ensures that teams across bp can build on AWS safely, consistently, and efficiently, while accelerating delivery through automation, intelligence, and modern AI-enabled platform services.
What you will deliver:
Platform strategy and roadmap
- Define and maintain the AWS platform architecture strategy and target-state design across bp.
- Develop and evolve the AWS platform roadmap in partnership with the Head of AWS Platform and Platform Engineering teams.
- Translate enterprise and business requirements into clear architectural direction and prioritised platform capabilities.
- Identify opportunities to improve scalability, resilience, security, cost efficiency, developer experience, and AI enablement across the AWS platform.
- Ensure AWS platform evolution aligns with bp’s wider cloud, data, and AI strategy, including multi-cloud consistency where appropriate.
- Drive the adoption of AI-enabled capabilities across the AWS platform where they improve automation, engineering productivity, observability, and operational decision-making.
Architecture, standards, and guardrails
- Define and maintain AWS reference architectures, patterns, and reusable platform building blocks.
- Establish architectural guardrails to ensure secure, compliant, consistent, and responsible use of AWS and AI capabilities across bp.
- Drive consistency in platform design across AWS and other cloud environments, balancing standardisation with platform-specific optimisation.
- Ensure security, identity, networking, observability, operational requirements, and AI governance considerations are embedded in AWS platform architecture by design, including AWS-specific patterns for network products, standards, and security controls such as SD-WAN and cloud-connected security capabilities.
- Evaluate new AWS and AI services and capabilities, providing clear guidance on adoption, constraints, and patterns.
- Define standards for safe and responsible use of AI services within the AWS platform, including data handling, model usage, and integration patterns.
Hands-on evaluation and technical validation
- Maintain strong hands-on technical engagement with AWS services and AI-enabled cloud capabilities, including prototyping and piloting new technologies.
- Validate architectural decisions through practical implementation experience, proof-of-concepts, and experimentation.
- Work closely with engineers to test and refine platform patterns, including AI-assisted development, before enterprise-wide adoption.
- Act as a technical authority who can demonstrate, not just describe, AWS and AI architectural approaches.
- Explore and assess emerging AWS AI services (such as foundation model services, agentic frameworks, and AI-enabled tooling) for platform applicability.
Collaboration and partner engagement
- Work closely with Connectivity, Identity, Security, Data, and other shared technology teams to deliver integrated platform capabilities.
- Partner with Platform Engineering teams to ensure architectural designs are translated into operational, consumable platform services.
- Engage with application and product teams to understand requirements and provide clear, pragmatic architectural guidance.
- Support teams in adopting AI capabilities within their workloads in a safe, governed, and scalable way.
- Influence technical decisions across programmes, ensuring alignment with platform standards and reducing fragmentation.
- Act as a trusted advisor across engineering, architecture, and delivery communities.
Technology leadership and governance
- Provide architectural leadership across the AWS platform domain.
- Lead and contribute to architecture review processes and technical governance forums.
- Mentor engineers and architects, raising overall architectural capability within the platform organisation.
- Promote engineering excellence, including Infrastructure as Code, automation, CI/CD, self-service platforms, cloud-native design principles, and AI-augmented engineering practices.
- Identify and address technical debt, architectural risks, and capability gaps within the platform.
- Define and evolve governance for responsible AI usage within the AWS platform ecosystem.
Risk, security, and operational excellence
Ensure AWS platform arcKey skills
AI-extracted from the job advert
Application advice
5 AI-generated recommendations to maximise your chances.
⭐ Lead your CV personal statement with AWS Platform Architecture credentials — the advert names this as the primary focus and uses the phrase 'senior architectural authority'.
📊 Quantify your AWS impact: e.g. 'Designed AWS landing zone serving 200+ product teams, reducing provisioning time by 60%' to demonstrate platform-scale delivery.
🤖 Explicitly call out hands-on AI/ML service evaluation experience (e.g. Amazon SageMaker, Bedrock) — the advert stresses 'real implementation experience, not theory alone' for AI-enabled services.
🗺️ Showcase roadmap ownership: list specific platform roadmaps you have authored and the business outcomes they unlocked, as the role requires translating strategy into a 'clear platform architecture roadmap'.
🔒 Highlight security governance and compliance work on AWS (e.g. AWS Control Tower, SCPs, guardrails) — the advert repeatedly references 'well-governed' and 'secure' platform delivery as core expectations.
Suggested CV bullets
3 bullets our AI drafted for this specific advert, mirroring its ATS keywords.
Add these 3 bullets under your most recent experience:
- •Defined and governed AWS platform architecture across 8 business units, establishing 35 reusable infrastructure patterns that reduced new workload onboarding time from 6 weeks to 9 days.
- •Led evaluation and pilot of Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker for internal developer tooling, producing architectural standards adopted across 4 product domains within 3 months of prototype completion.
- •Authored and maintained AWS platform roadmap in partnership with 3 senior engineering leads, aligning 12 platform capabilities to enterprise cloud strategy and delivering £2.1M in annualised cost optimisation.
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Letter preview — tailored to Appcast Enterprise
Dear Hiring Manager,
Bp's AWS Platform Architect role is precisely the kind of senior architectural authority position I have been building towards — defining platform strategy and governing cloud architecture at enterprise scale is where I deliver most impact. The emphasis on hands-on evaluation of AI-enabled AWS services, combined with translating business requirements into a coherent platform roadmap, aligns directly with the work I have been doing across large-scale cloud programmes.
My background in AWS platform architecture and enterprise governance spans designing multi-account landing zones, authoring architectural standards adopted by over 150 product teams, and piloting cloud-native AI services to ground decision-making in real implementation experience. I have led cross-domain alignment initiatives that reduced platform inconsistency and accelerated delivery cycles by 40% across a 12-team engineering organisation.
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Interview questions
10 questions generated from this advert.
Technical
- ›How would you design a multi-account AWS landing zone for a global enterprise with 100+ product teams, ensuring security guardrails without slowing delivery?
- ›Walk us through how you have evaluated and piloted an emerging AWS or AI-enabled service and translated that into an architectural standard.
- ›What patterns do you use to balance platform consistency with the autonomy product teams need to innovate on AWS?
- ›How do you approach cost optimisation at platform level across a large AWS estate — which AWS-native tools and governance mechanisms do you rely on?
- ›Describe your approach to defining and maintaining an AWS platform architecture roadmap when enterprise priorities shift frequently.
Behavioural
- ›Tell me about a time you had to influence senior stakeholders to adopt a significant architectural change they were initially resistant to.
- ›Describe a situation where you identified a critical gap in platform security or resilience and led the response — what was the outcome?
- ›Give an example of when you had to balance short-term delivery pressure against long-term architectural integrity. How did you handle it?
- ›Tell me about a time you piloted a new cloud or AI technology and used that hands-on experience to shape organisational standards.
- ›Describe a situation where you had to align multiple engineering teams around a single platform direction. What challenges did you face and how did you resolve them?
STAR answer examples
Model answers using the Situation-Task-Action-Result framework. Adapt to your own experience.
Tell me about a time you had to influence senior stakeholders to adopt a significant architectural change they were initially resistant to.
Tell me about a time you piloted a new cloud or AI technology and used that hands-on experience to shape organisational standards.