# Technical Solutions Architect > Zippd · Manchester, United Kingdom · — · Posted 2026-04-14 **Workplace:** on_site **Department:** Technology ## Description **Description** **Company:** Zippd** Location:** Manchester City Centre, UK (100% Onsite)** Job Type:** Full-time **Visa Status:** No sponsorships available (Must have the right to work in the UK) **1\. The Role Overview** Zippd is a fast-moving, technology-first logistics platform. We are building the routing engines, warehouse management systems (WMS), and APIs that power the next generation of urban delivery. We are looking for a hands-on **Technical Solutions Architect** to act as the critical bridge between our operations, our clients, our engineering team, and our wider business. You will own the technical design of new features end-to-end — from gathering requirements with non-technical stakeholders, through architecting the right solution against our existing platform, all the way to presenting it back to both the engineering team and senior leadership for sign-off. This is not a pure documentation role. You will be expected to have a programmer's instinct, an architect's eye for trade-offs, and a consultant's ability to communicate. You'll also spend around 20% of your time acting as the technical face of Zippd, supporting our retail partners as they integrate into our API ecosystem. **Please Note:** This is a strictly 100% onsite role based in our Manchester office. **2\. Core Responsibilities** **Technical Solution Architecture & Technical Design (45%)** - Translate business and operational requirements into robust, scalable technical solutions that fit cleanly into our existing platform. - Design microservice architectures, API contracts, database schemas, and integration patterns that align with our engineering principles. - Make pragmatic build vs buy vs integrate decisions, considering cost, time, and long-term maintainability. - Produce high-quality sequence diagrams, Entity-Relationship Diagrams (ERDs), system context diagrams, and API data flow charts. - Write air-tight technical specifications in Confluence so our engineering team (Laravel / MySQL / OSRM / AWS) knows exactly what to build without ambiguity. **Stakeholder Engagement & Requirements Gathering (25%)** - Run requirements sessions with non-technical stakeholders — operations managers, commercial teams, the CEO, and the CTO. - Convert ambiguous business problems into clearly scoped technical solutions. - Present proposed solutions back to both the engineering team and senior leadership, defending the design and adapting based on feedback. - Act as the trusted technical voice in the room when business and engineering disagree. **Engineering Support & Live Issue Triage (10%)** - Provide ongoing support to the engineering team throughout build — clarifying intent, answering questions, and unblocking decisions. - Act as second-line technical support for complex production issues, working alongside engineering to diagnose and resolve. **Client Integration Support (20%)** - Act as the technical point of contact for external retailers and partners onboarding onto the Zippd platform. - Support clients in understanding and consuming our REST APIs and webhooks. - Troubleshoot integration issues, test API payloads, and ensure a smooth technical handover before clients go into live production. **3\. Required Technical Background** This role is for someone with **real engineering DNA** — not a pure business analyst with diagramming skills. You must bring: - **Programming background:** A previous career as a developer (Laravel/PHP, Python, Node.js, Go, or similar). You don't need to write production code daily here, but you must be able to read a pull request, sketch a working algorithm on a whiteboard, and have an opinion on code quality. - **Microservice architecture experience:** Hands-on experience designing or working in microservice ecosystems — service boundaries, inter-service communication, event-driven patterns, queue systems (Redis, SQS, RabbitMQ), and the trade-offs vs monoliths. - **Database design:** Strong SQL fundamentals. You can design a normalised relational schema from scratch, understand indexing strategies, and know when to break the rules (denormalisation, caching, read replicas). NoSQL exposure is a plus. - **AWS experience:** Practical knowledge of core AWS services — EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, CloudWatch. You should be able to design a cost-effective, scalable AWS architecture and explain why you chose each service. - **API design:** Deep understanding of REST principles, JSON payloads, webhooks, OAuth/JWT authentication, rate limiting, versioning, and idempotency. - **Diagramming & Documentation:** Expert level in Lucidchart, Draw.io, Miro, or similar. Proven experience writing technical specs in Confluence and tracking work through Jira. - **System state design:** You can confidently model complex state machines (e.g. mapping how an order transitions from Pending → Allocated → In-Transit → Delivered, including all the failure paths in between). **4\. The Profile We Are Looking For** - **You are a translator with engineering credibility:** You can listen to an operations manager talk about warehouse chaos and translate it into a microservice design, an ERD, and a clean Confluence page that the dev team can build from. You can also defend that design when challenged. - **You are pragmatic, not academic:** You understand that perfect architecture doesn't exist — only architecture that ships and supports the business. You make sensible trade-offs and explain them clearly. - **You are detail-obsessed:** You do not leave edge cases to chance. When you write a spec, the dev team rarely has to ask "what happens if this fails?" - **You are an exceptional communicator:** You possess crystal-clear written and spoken English. You can comfortably present to the CEO one hour and pair with a senior engineer the next. - **You are commercially aware:** You understand that every technical decision has a business cost. You don't propose solutions in isolation — you weigh effort, value, and risk. - **You are ready to be in the room:** You thrive in a fast-paced, in-person environment. (Remote or hybrid work is not available for this role.) **5\. What We Offer** - A pivotal role at the heart of a fast-growing logistics technology business - Genuine ownership of the technical direction of major platform features - Direct exposure to the CTO, CEO, and senior leadership - A modern tech stack (Laravel, MySQL, OSRM, AWS) and the freedom to influence its direction - A competitive salary, negotiable based on experience - Manchester city centre office, with the team in the room every day ## Apply [Apply at Zippd](https://apply.workable.com/zippd/j/AE79675F22/apply) --- Powered by [Workable](https://www.workable.com)