Technical Architect

Fastmarkets is an industry-leading price-reporting agency (PRA) and information provider for global commodities, providing price data, news, analytics and events for the agriculture, forest products, metals and mining and new-generation energy markets.

Fastmarkets' data is critical for customers seeking to understand and predict dynamic, sometimes opaque markets, enabling trading and risk management. Fastmarkets is a global business with a history dating back to 1865 and is built on trust and deep market knowledge. It has more than 700 employees spread across global locations in the UK, US, China, India, Singapore, Brazil, Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland and beyond. 

The Role

This is a newly created role, established to give Product Engineering dedicated architectural leadership and to build a genuine technical specialist career pathway alongside Fastmarkets' existing management track.

You will own solution architecture and technical strategy for Product Engineering - providing technical direction across its squads, setting design standards, and ensuring solutions are built to be scalable, resilient, and secure. This includes architectural ownership of Product Engineering's major programmes and projects, where you may be embedded in delivery on a part-time or full-time basis depending on the scale, complexity, and risk of the work. Alongside this, you will hold shared accountability - in partnership with the Head of AI Enablement, Head of Data Platform, and Cloud Architect - for driving AI-enabled product development lifecycle (PDLC) practice across Product Engineering, Data & AI, and Cloud Engineering, fostering a cross-organisation community of best practice while ensuring Product Engineering's own domain-specific AI use cases are addressed.

This is a highly cross-functional role. You will work closely with engineering, data, cloud, and product teams to standardise, govern, and mature how Fastmarkets designs and delivers software - and you will help define what a technical specialist career path looks like at Fastmarkets, acting as a role model for that path yourself.

Principal Accountabilities

Solution Architecture & Technical Strategy

• Own solution architecture and technical strategy for Product Engineering across its squads
• Provide technical direction on major projects, ensuring solutions are scalable, flexible, resilient, and secure
• Provide hands-on architectural leadership to major product programmes - embedding into a delivery team on a part-time or full-time basis where the scale, complexity, or risk of the work requires it
• Work alongside programme managers and product owners to keep architectural decisions, delivery sequencing, and technical dependencies aligned
• Act as the technical escalation point for cross-squad architectural decisions

Cross-Organisation Standardisation & Governance

• Drive standardisation, governance, and specialisation practice across Product Engineering, Data & AI, and Cloud Engineering - working directly with the relevant groups in each organisation
• Partner with Cloud Engineering's architecture capability and Data & AI's platform architecture on cross-org technical decisions
• Provide technical oversight of third-party delivery partners, vendors, and systems integrators - reviewing their designs and implementation against Fastmarkets' architecture standards and holding them to those standards

AI-Enabled PDLC

• Co-own, with the Head of AI Enablement, Head of Data Platform, and Cloud Architect, the community of best practice for AI-enabled PDLC across the three organisations
• Ensure Product Engineering's domain-specific AI use cases are identified, prioritised, and addressed as part of the shared PDLC model
• Champion the use of AI-assisted development tools and practice across Product Engineering

Specialist Career Pathway

• Own and define the specialist career pathway this role is designed to anchor
• Establish the levels and capabilities that distinguish deep technical specialists, giving engineers a credible alternative to the people-management track

KEY INTERFACES

• Director of Engineering, Product Engineering
• Head of AI Enablement
• Head of Data Platform
• Cloud Architect / Cloud Engineering
• Product Engineering squads and leads
• Product counterparts within Product Engineering
• Product owners and programme / delivery managers
• Third-party delivery partners, vendors, and systems integrators
• Enterprise Architect

We recruit talented, dynamic people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, all united by a belief in our mission to provide the world’s leading and most trusted price reporting, events, and intelligence service for the markets we serve. We’re proud to be an equal opportunities employer and are committed to creating a fully inclusive workplace, where everyone feels able to participate and contribute meaningfully.

If you are open-minded, curious, resilient, solutions-oriented and committed to promoting equality, then read on.

KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS

We're looking for a technical architect who combines strong direction-setting and cross-team leadership with genuine technical credibility, across both traditional solution architecture and AI-enabled delivery. This role is weighted toward architecture, standards, and driving alignment across teams rather than full-time hands-on building - but you should have enough hands-on experience to set credible standards, review architecture critically, and know the difference between what sounds good in a slide and what actually survives production.

Key Experience / Qualifications

• 12+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years operating at architecture or senior technical leadership level
• Proven experience as a solution architect or technical architect, setting technical direction and design standards across multiple teams or squads
• Strong software architecture fundamentals: distributed systems, microservices, API design, service-oriented architecture, and cloud-native patterns (Fastmarkets runs primarily on Microsoft Azure)
• Experience defining or contributing to technical standards, governance, and engineering best practice across multiple teams - able to drive alignment without direct authority over every team involved
• Experience acting as architect on large, multi-team product programmes - working with programme managers and product owners, and holding third-party suppliers or systems integrators to defined architecture standards
• Track record of taking AI/GenAI capabilities from prototype through to reliable, monitored production systems
• Solid understanding of agentic or multi-agent AI system design (orchestration patterns, tool use, agent coordination) and the operational realities of running them in production
• Working knowledge of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) - ingestion, chunking, embeddings, vector search, and production retrieval pipelines
• Track record of leading or significantly influencing an AI-enabled product development lifecycle (PDLC) - embedding AI into how software gets built, not just what gets built
• Comfortable operating at both ends of the spectrum: credible in architecture conversations with senior technical and business stakeholders, and able to engage in technical detail when needed
• Strong communicator, able to bring multiple engineering teams and disciplines (Product Engineering, Data & AI, Cloud Engineering) toward shared technical direction

Personal Attributes

• Deeply technical, with genuine hands-on credibility - leads through technical judgement, not just process
• Strategic thinker who can translate broad technical direction into concrete, achievable standards and practice
• Highly collaborative; able to drive alignment across teams without formal authority over them
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity - this is a newly created role and part of the job is helping to shape it
• Results-driven, with a focus on long-term technical health and career pathway impact, not just individual delivery

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE (First 6 Months)

• Built genuine working relationships and credibility across Product Engineering, Data & AI, and Cloud Engineering, as well as with Product counterparts - recognised as a trusted technical voice by peers and teams across all of these groups, not just your own
• Partnered with the Head of AI Enablement, Head of Data Platform, and Cloud Architect to establish the shared community of best practice for AI-enabled PDLC, with the model tested against real work in at least one domain-specific use case
• Started to shape - even if not yet finalised - the standards and governance approach for solution architecture across the three organisations

If you're excited about the role but your experience, skills or qualifications don't perfectly align, we encourage you to apply anyway.

Our Values

Fastmarkets people come from all different walks of life. It’s this mix of brilliant personalities, experiences and insights that gives us that warm, open, and friendly culture you can feel as soon as you meet us. But however wonderfully different we all are, there are six things we all have in common – and they form our Fastmarkets values.

Created by our own employees to reflect some of the personal traits that Fastmarkets people have, our values are key to what makes our culture unique. They reflect who each of us are and they're embedded in everything we do. Our values are:

• METRICS DRIVEN. We use insights to improve our customers’ experience and our business performance
   
• ACCOUNTABLE. We are accountable to ourselves and those we work with: we keep our promises and get things done
   
• GROWTH MINDSET. This value enables us to be nimble to the changing realities and operate with a sense of urgency
   
• INCLUSIVE. We are inclusive and respectful, celebrating each of us and giving everyone a deep sense of belonging with the desire to bring their best self to work every day.
   
• CUSTOMER CENTRIC. We are customer-centric in all that we do
   
• COLLABORATIVE. We are collaborative, able to work across teams and capitalise on the diversity of intellect, perspectives, and experiences.

We are committed to ensuring all candidates feel welcomed and supported. Should your application advance and you require accommodations for the interview process, please inform us so we can make the necessary arrangements.

Reward and benefits at Fastmarkets

We believe in fair pay and benefits that support you both inside and outside of work. Through Fastmarkets Rewards, you'll have access to a range of core benefits and a flexible allowance, giving you the freedom to tailor your package to suit your lifestyle, wellbeing and financial priorities. We know that everyone's needs are different, so we've designed our benefits to support our diverse global team wherever they're based.

Specific benefits may vary by country and role.

You’ve read a little about us – now it’s over to you!

If you like what you’ve read so far and think you can see yourself as a Fastmarkets person, it’s time to fill in your application form. This form is an important part of the selection process: it’s used to determine whether or not you’ll be chosen to have an interview and acts as a basis for the questions we’ll ask you on the day.

It’s vital that you try to capture all the relevant information we have asked for on the form so we can get a good feel for who you are and why you’re great.