Why LNER?
We go beyond. For everyone. Our vision is to be the most loved, progressive and responsible way to travel for generations to come. Now we're looking for the people who can deliver this, every day.
Since we took over on the East Coast mainline, we've been changing the face of rail travel. Our new Azuma train has brought faster journey times, more space and greater reliability. Our exciting plans to embrace new ideas, experiences, backgrounds and ambitions make this the ideal time to join.
Bringing passion. Being bold. Always caring. Owning it. They're the values that make us LNER.
Are you on board?
We are seeking a Digital Solutions Architect for a one-year fixed-term contract initially.
At LNER, we are leading the rail industry in innovation to solve major issues affecting our customers and staff. We have an ambitious five-year plan, along with the resources and funding required to deliver a digital transformation that will bring about a step-change in travel and customer experience. The primary focus of this role will be to deliver a data lake project, enhance LNER's Machine Learning capabilities, and transform our customer contact centre technologies.
LNER's Architecture team is new, having been established for about a year, and is working across a portfolio of transformation projects that are revolutionising the rail industry. This role is at the heart of the transformation, and your work will have immediate and visible impacts. Over the last three years, LNER has invested heavily in a transformation that has revolutionised our customer experience through digital tools. We have made significant upgrades, moving to the cloud, deploying machine learning, and using voice and AI, among other things. Now, we want to go further by leveraging machine learning and related technologies to create a truly 21st-century rail business.
You will thrive in a fast-changing Digital & Innovation team, where priorities can change and shift as we undergo continual transformation. This is not a business-as-usual role, so you must be comfortable with a level of uncertainty.
We are seeking a candidate with varied experience, gained in other sectors, with rail experience being beneficial but not essential. You should bring innovative ideas and the ability to create solutions using the latest Machine Learning technology and similar tools. Customer-centricity is vital, as is the ability to lead and articulate solutions at meetings with non-technical stakeholders. You should be highly curious and able to pursue work solutions independently.
This role is all about designing technical solutions that will enable great customer and colleague travel experiences. If you want to join a role where you are at the centre of things, where your contributions will have an immediate impact, where your colleagues will look up to you, and where the business is dynamic, then apply now.
What would you be doing…?
Reporting to our Lead Solution Architect and working inside our Digital team, you would,
- Be a trusted technical authority in application, infrastructure, data, security and integration architecture to create an engaging, frictionless, multi-channel journey for our customers, working across the Digital project's portfolio.
- Own the integration architecture for your projects to ensure all solutions are interoperable, scalable, flexible and aligned to LNER strategy
- Work with the other architects to define the principles, standards, and practices to ensure best practice is followed by all projects and suppliers.
- Work with the other Architects to define the NFR's with supporting acceptance criteria to define what ‘good' looks like from a technical perspective with measures to verify compliance
- Help define the technical landscape and understand the ripple effects of changes to ensure we can delight our customers across all touchpoints (omni channel and people)
- Ensure solutions match the reference architecture, architectural building blocks and non-functional requirements to provide a structure for project outputs.
- Help enforce a governance mechanism to exercise control on all outputs being produced to ensure that upon delivery a robust, scalable, performant, secure and maintainable technical landscape exists.
- Provide Quality Assurance and testing support to all project outputs to ensure they are fit for purpose and fit for use.
- Show good stakeholder management, budgeting, estimating, and influencing team members and third parties.
- Establish correct tooling and processes to support the Architecture function.
- Show lateral thinking in developing innovative solutions.
What do we need you to have…?
- Proven expertise of defining and delivering a robust, scalable, performant, secure and maintainable integrations and architecture across an omni channel digital domain
- Familiarity with popular contact centre platforms and technologies is highly desirable, as is experience with contact centre automation and omnichannel customer engagement strategies.
- Experienced in architecting data lake solutions that enable efficient data processing and analysis, leveraging the latest cloud-based technologies
- Experience in designing customer centric solutions that deliver exceptional customer experiences while maximising operational efficiency.
- Strong skills in designing and implementing machine learning models that can deliver actionable insights and improve customer experiences
- Deep understanding of Digital/ecommerce technologies, frameworks, patterns, and trends including AWS and machine learning
- Experience of finding alternative solutions when the obvious ones wont work or be acceptable
- Demonstrable artefacts for Application, Infrastructure, Data, Security and Service Orientated Architecture within the Digital Domain
- Ability to work within your team specifically, but also laterally with the other Architects
- Experience in digital transformation and innovation environments
- You should be able to demonstrate that you can work well and consensually in multi-functional project teams and with 3rd parties to produce a compliant technical output
- Quality assurance of deliverables to ensure fit for purpose and fit for use
- Specification of Non-Functional Requirements and ensuring compliance of deliverables produced by project teams
- Strong influencing skills – you do need to be a people person.
Are you ready to guide LNER through some huge changes? Want to be the custodian for all things solutions architecture across LNER? It's time to update your CV and click ‘apply'
We look forward to reading over your application.
What you'll get:
- Free travel on LNER + 75% off other companies' tickets (for you & dependents)
- Discounted international train tickets (after one year's service)
- 50% discount on LNER tickets for friends & family
- Generous pension scheme
- Annual cycle to work schemes
- Discount, savings and cashback scheme from top retailers
- Health & wellbeing schemes and discounts
- Host of training opportunities to help further your career
- Rewards & awards to recognise when you shine
What we believe:
To be the most loved, progressive and responsible train operating company, we must make a meaningful difference – always doing what's right for our customers, our people, the communities and destinations we serve, the future of the industry we lead and the environment we cherish.
We know that our people are the beating heart of everything we do. We are committed to creating an inclusive, engaged culture that supports everyone at every stage of their journey – and ensures that when you're at LNER, you can always be you. No wonder most people never want to leave!
Diversity and inclusion
We are passionate about creating a diverse and inclusive workforce, representative of the communities we serve, and are creating ways to inspire diverse talent to join LNER.
Developing our people
We are focused on creating a learning culture, to support our people to be the best they can be at work by providing them with the tools and resources to navigate their development and career journey.
Health & wellbeing
To create a culture where our people can perform at their best, the physical health and mental wellbeing of our people is of paramount importance to us.
What next?
As we say, we have fantastic opportunities for ambitious people from all sorts of different backgrounds, so now is the time to join the team at LNER – without delay!
Start your journey here