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Job Description

Role: Enterprise solution architect

Location: London UK

Purpose:

The Solution Architect role is a leadership position which include the following aspects: -

• Own the relationship between Enterprise Architecture and delivery, communicating in both directions:
• Informing the EA roadmap to make it fit for purpose and achievable
• Explaining how to implement it
• Take responsibility for specific components within the ecosystem.
• Hold and communicate the vision for how they will evolve to reach the target architectural state, reducing technical debt and stay in support.
• Produce solution options and technical designs for projects, consulting with scrums to ensure the designs are understood and viable.
• Play a hands-on technical role when required.
• Identify and proactively manage risks relating to the as is and to be technologies in the ecosystem.
• Work through governance processes to align with company standards.
• Work effectively with peers in the Solution Architect role, collaborating on and challenging each other’s work.
• Work management of Technical Leads providing both technical and pastoral mentoring.
• Provide thought leadership as part of the IT Leadership Team, challenging where appropriate but supporting the position that is agreed.
• Maintain a culture of empowerment and continuous proactive improvement.
• Provide effective guidance to staff and scrums to help them contribute to the success of the org.
• Support training and development to maintain the competencies, behaviors and technical expertise of a high performing team
• Assist in the development of AOP and Capital Expenditure plans
• Underpin the delivery of both strategic and tactical projects/programmes across the Group

Role Holder Qualities:

• IT professional with extensive knowledge and expertise in large, complex system environments.
• Technical excellence in your specialist area, combined with versatility and breadth of technical knowledge.
• Strong leadership and people skills and strong team player.
• Commercial awareness.
• Logical approach to software solutions and problem solving.
• Active and valued contributor in peer group and to upward reporting lines.

Accountabilities:

There will be a wide range of technical accountabilities and activities performed by the job holder depending on the specific discipline e.g. Design, Development, Support and environment Configuration.

Delivery Focused

• Constantly challenge and drive forwards the levels of quality delivered by the team, in concert with your peers
• As part of the IT Leadership Team, contribute to the overall development strategy and continuous improvement plans

Qualifications and Training:

• Experience of working in a matrix managed environment, with mixed teams including contractors and outsourced vendors
• Experience of working within Agile and Waterfall delivery methodologies
• Ability to own and manage delivery risks and issues of a technical nature
• Ability to know when to escalate to senior leadership when appropriate
• Provide effective communication on the management and progression of risks and issues
• Understands all aspects of quality management and builds quality control for all key development deliverables into the processes adopted within the Engineering function
• Excellent appreciation of stakeholder expectations
• Able to develop, maintain and strengthen relationships with key stakeholders
• Excellent oral and written communication
• Able to construct and deliver presentations and options papers
• Able to facilitate groups up to achieve desired solutions
• Seeks opportunities to undertake training and mentoring of colleagues within the team and to more junior staff in wider development community

Technical skills:

• Enterprise standard architecture documentation
• Designing high quality and repeatable processes that result in low levels of production issues
• Awareness of industry best practice and new and upcoming technology trends
• Full solution architectural understanding across networking and software
• Experience managing large programmes of work across multiple delivery teams with varying technologies. Ideally gained within an enterprise scale organization within a technology or delivery team or similar.
• Tracking delivery timelines and interdependencies across multiple teams to report into stakeholders.
• Technical exposure to and/or experience in a range of technologies and architectural best practice concepts, specifically
• Data exchange and integration best practices and patterns on traditional “onprem” networks and cloud networks (Azure and GCP).
• Experience of delivering technical solutions in the insurance industry and a SME in topics such as Products, Claims and Settlement
• Able to understand and query enterprise size Oracle databases to quickly diagnose issues and make recommendations to the delivery teams.
• Automation of CICD pipelines in ADO and/or Jira across different technologies
• Able to read through repos of .NET, Java and PL-SQL code to review and/or understand the intention of the code.
• Exposure and passion for new and emerging technologies and trends