About the Company
At IMSERV, we're proud to be one of the UK's leading energy data and metering specialists. We deliver award-winning services to customers across the country, providing specialist metering technology for electricity, gas and water, alongside highly accurate energy data collection services.
About the Role
The role will own the architecture of the Astral platform, including the governed data foundation, orchestration, rules and entitlement engine, integration layer, API tier, portal and partner front ends, and the AI layer. The role will also act as the design authority for all significant technical decisions across the product squads and own the technical roadmap from the current estate to the target state, working closely with the Head of Development. A key focus of this roadmap will be the transition from a single-tenant to a multi-tenant architecture.
Responsibilities
Keep the current and target architecture documented, validated and understood across the department.
Review and approve significant technical decisions: patterns, technology choices, integration approaches and third-party services.
Define the API strategy: portal, analytics and data-feed APIs treated as products, with entitlement (who sees what, down to meter point, site and channel) enforced once at the tier.
Design the multi-utility data architecture: how metering, consumption, carbon, asset and CRM data flows from replaceable source systems through the integration layer (Microsoft Fabric and middleware) and is productised for operational and commercial use.
Design the rules and orchestration layer: an event backbone, an orchestration engine for job lifecycles, a decision engine driven by business-editable decision tables, and read models served through the APIs. Adopt proven engines rather than building bespoke ones and run advisory-only before automating actions.
Design the AI layer: retrieval over the data foundation, guardrails, and model and service selection, respecting entitlement throughout.
Lead build-versus-buy evaluations on total cost, time to value and lock-in risk.
What you'll need
Knowledge & Qualifications
Significant experience as a technical or solutions architect on customer-facing SaaS platforms, spanning web applications, API tiers and data platforms.
Direct experience of multi-tenant SaaS architecture, ideally including a single-tenant to multi-tenant migration.
An engineering background on or near our stack: C#/.NET, Angular and Azure.
Experience of event-driven architecture and workflow or rules tooling: orchestration engines (Azure Durable Functions, Temporal, Camunda or similar), decision tables (DMN), message backbones and CQRS-style read models.
Practical, current knowledge of AI: LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, agent patterns, and what it takes to run them safely over commercial customer data.
Knowledge of the wider Microsoft estate, ideally including Microsoft Fabric; hands-on Azure AI services desirable.
Energy or utilities domain knowledge desirable: metering, half-hourly settlement, MHHS, carbon reporting.
Skills
Data architecture depth for high-volume time-series and reference data.
Able to work pragmatically in a smaller or scaling organisation, where sequencing matters more than frameworks.
Able to explain a trade-off to a non-technical executive as clearly as to an engineering team.
Sound commercial judgement on build-versus-buy and technology selection.
Benefits
28 days' holiday plus Bank Holidays
Buy & sell annual leave scheme
Up to a 10% bonus
Enhanced salary sacrifice pension
Life assurance (up to 6x salary*)
Simply Health plan (with upgrade options)
Car salary sacrifice scheme*
(*Length of service and T&Cs apply)
Equal Opportunity Statement
At IMSERV, we're committed to building a team where everyone feels valued, respected and able to do their best work. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, experiences and communities. A diverse team brings fresh perspectives, strengthens collaboration and helps us deliver the best possible service to our customers.
If you're interested in the role but don't meet every single requirement, we'd still encourage you to apply.
(Please note that we reserve the right to close this position before the expiry date.)
