Senior Architect

Job Description:

Job Title: Senior Architect

Corporate Title:  Up to SVP

Location:  Chester

Company Overview:

At Bank of America, we are guided by a common purpose to help make financial lives better through the power of every connection.  We do this by driving Responsible Growth and delivering for our clients, teammates, communities and shareholders every day.

Being a Great Place to Work is core to how we drive Responsible Growth.  This includes our commitment to being a diverse and inclusive workplace, attracting and developing exceptional talent, supporting our teammates’ physical, emotional, and financial wellness, recognizing and rewarding performance, and how we make an impact in the communities we serve.

At Bank of America, you can build a successful career with opportunities to learn, grow, and make an impact.  Join us!

Location Overview:

Find us in the city of Chester, a destination renowned for its culture, history, and beauty. Working at Bank of America Chester offers a far-reaching global career for a world-renowned organisation, whilst being ideally situated against the backdrop of the rolling North Wales hills and the banks of the serene River Dee.

Role Description

The Operational Intelligence Team is seeking an experienced Senior Architect to further develop, document, and evolve the monitoring strategy, with a focus on standards and application instrumentation for critical Banking Applications.

As a Senior Architect, you will play a key role in shaping and advancing monitoring strategy and solutions that align with business information flows and systems architecture. Building on existing capabilities and frameworks, you will contribute to integrated systems planning and recommend enhancements that strengthen current solutions and support wider organisational objectives, particularly within the Application Production Support monitoring strategy.

You will help drive the adoption of consistent monitoring capabilities across critical business applications, ensuring alignment with business processes and operational needs. Acting as a seasoned technical resource, you will provide leadership both independently and collaboratively, contributing to shared goals and continuous improvement across the team.

This role offers the opportunity to work closely with Business, Application Development, Production Support, and Monitoring Tooling teams, leveraging established relationships and knowledge to define monitoring requirements and deliver end-to-end monitoring solutions.

While this is not an application development role, an understanding of application architecture and how components interact across middleware, system software, and infrastructure is essential. A broad engineering skillset will support the design and implementation of effective monitoring solutions.

Responsibilities

• Act as a Subject Matter Expert for monitoring tools within the global monitoring strategy 
• Configure and enhance monitoring for applications across Cloud and container-based environments 
• Deliver demos, overviews, and training sessions to support wider adoption, creating supporting materials such as presentations and operational guides 
• Collaborate with Application Production Support (APS) teams in the planning and scheduling of deployments 
• Partner with APS and other teams to optimise monitoring configurations, events, and dashboards 
• Produce reporting on tool adoption, usage, and key performance metrics 
• Contribute to global discussions around the ongoing evolution of monitoring strategy, sharing insights and best practices 

What We Are Looking For

We are seeking a highly skilled and hands-on Senior Systems / Platform Engineer to support and evolve large-scale, mission-critical data platforms. The ideal candidate combines deep Unix expertise, strong automation capabilities, and proven experience operating highly distributed environments at scale.

Core Technical Skills

• Advanced expertise in Unix/Linux systems administration, including performance tuning, troubleshooting, and scripting
• Strong proficiency in Git and source control management, including branching strategies and integration with CI/CD pipelines
• Proven experience with infrastructure automation, particularly Ansible, in large enterprise environments

Splunk Platform Expertise

• Hands-on experience in Splunk administration within production environments
• Demonstrated ability to manage large, distributed Splunk deployments, including:
• Indexer clustering at scale
• Smart Store architectures
• High-volume data ingestion environments (multi-terabyte per day)
• Strong understanding of cluster lifecycle operations, performance optimization, and reliability engineering

Cribl Platform Expertise

• Certified or highly experienced Cribl administrator
• Experience managing large-scale Cribl environments, including:
• Distributed deployments with hundreds of Worker Nodes
• Extensive Edge node infrastructures
• Strong knowledge of data routing, pipeline optimization, and operational management at scale

Desirable Skills

• Experience in development and/or support of Banking applications 
• Exposure to Major Incident Management processes 
• Experience working within large, multi-data centre enterprise environments 
• Business awareness, with adaptable communication and a flexible approach to evolving priorities and projects 
• Experience working within large, multi-data center enterprise environments
• Strong understanding of observability and monitoring platforms (e.g., Splunk, Dynatrace)
• Ability to troubleshoot issues across highly distributed systems under production load
• Familiarity with ITIL processes and working within structured change management frameworks
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively across global teams
• Ability to align technical solutions with business and operational objectives

Benefits of working at Bank of America:

UK

• Private healthcare for you and your family plus an annual health screen to help you manage your physical wellness with the option to purchase a screen for your partner

• Competitive pension plan, life assurance and group income protection cover if you become unable to work as a result of a disability or health reasons

• 20 days of back-up childcare including access to school holiday clubs and 20 days of back-up adult care per annum

• The ability to change your core benefits as well as the option of selecting a variety of flexible benefits to suit your personal circumstances including access to a wellbeing account, travel insurance, critical illness etc.

• Access to an emotional wellbeing helpline, mental health first aiders and virtual GP services.

• Access to an Employee Assistance Program for confidential support and help for everyday matters

• Ability to donate to charities of your choice directly through payroll and the bank will match your contribution

• Opportunity to access our Arts & Culture corporate membership program and receive discounted entry to some of the UK’s most iconic cultural institutions and exhibitions.

• Opportunity to give back to your community, develop new skills and work with new groups of people by volunteering in your local community.

Bank of America:

Good conduct and sound judgment is crucial to our long-term success. It’s important that all employees in the organisation understand the expected standards of conduct and how we manage conduct risk. Individual accountability and an ownership mind-set are the cornerstones of our Code of Conduct and are at the heart of managing risk well.

We are an equal opportunities employer and ensure that no applicant is subject to less favourable treatment on the grounds of sex, gender identity or gender reassignment, marital or civil partner status, race, religion or belief, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origins, age, sexual orientation, pregnancy or maternity, socio-economic background, responsibility for dependants or physical or mental disability. The Bank selects candidates for interview based on their skills, qualifications and experience.

We strive to ensure that our recruitment processes are accessible for all candidates and encourage any candidates to tell us about any adjustment requirements.