Lead Architect in CBDC PROGRAMME

Job Description

The Bank of England is the UK's central bank. Our mission is to deliver monetary and financial stability for the people of the United Kingdom.

Like other central banks, we are looking at the case for issuing Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). We call the UK version of CBDC the digital pound.

For more information about the digital pound see: The digital pound | Bank of England

Role

The Bank of England is looking for Solution Architects to join our Central Bank Digital Currency division. In this role you have a rare opportunity to help shape how money in the UK might work in the future!

You will explore the technology design and architecture options for a potential digital pound. This will involve evaluating the technology choices which might deliver the functional and non-functional requirements and developing a deep understanding of a potential architectural model for a digital pound and its underlying design features.

The successful applicant will:

• Provide technical guidance, direction, and collaborative leadership to our CBDC technology work, including guiding and influencing senior stakeholders.
• Recommend solutions to problems, and explain and rationalise choices, especially when multiple options are available.
• Assess technical feasibility and bring to the role the skills for design optimisation.
• Combine technical expertise and leadership skills to mentor other staff, helping embed continuous improvement efforts across teams.

• Experience of working with physical, internally hosted, and public cloud infrastructure.
• Experience working with containers or Kubernetes.
• A strong background in systems engineering and scalable data architectures.
• A good understanding of distributed data systems.
• An ability to conduct innovative research, making recommendations based on the conclusions drawn.
• The ability to synthesise and present technical information to a non-technical audience and rationalise design choices.
• Strong interpersonal skills, and a collaborative and inclusive working style, with experience of effective liaison with a diverse set of partners.

• Exposure to software development projects, ideally within a financial or regulatory environment.
• Solution development experience, including in areas such as API development, data modelling, data pipelines, event streaming, database structures, blockchain technology etc.
• Knowledge of OLTP databases such as Postgres, MySQL, Oracle, or SQL Server.
• Programming skills in Java or Python (or similar).
• Expertise in Agile methodology.
• Knowledge and understanding of existing payment systems in the UK.
• An interest in CBDC or the future of money.

• A non-contributory, career average pension giving you a guaranteed retirement benefit of 1/95th of your annual salary for every year worked. There is the option to increase your pension (to 1/50th) or decrease (to 1/120th) in exchange for salary through our flexible benefits programme each year.
• A discretionary performance award based on a current award pool.
• A 8% benefits allowance with the option to take as salary or purchase a wide range of flexible benefits.
• 26 days' annual leave with option to buy up to 12 additional days through flexible benefits.
• Private medical insurance and income protection.