Key Responsibilities:
- Provides detailed and specific advice regarding the application of their specialism(s) to the organization's planning and operations.
- Responsible for solution design, business development and transition of projects from presales to delivery as well as ongoing sales support.
- Selects and applies appropriate design standards, methods and tools, consistent with the agreed enterprise and solution architectures and ensure that these are effectively applied and adopted.
- Guides successful implementation and execution of system solutions.
- Contributes to the development of solution architectures in specific business, infrastructure or functional areas.
- Maps business processes and relationships clearly, in line with the solution features, and ensure that the recommended approach supports the overall scope of the solution.
- Designs components using appropriate modelling techniques following agreed architectures, design standards, patterns and methodology.
- Provides pre-sales technical support and expertise in analysing client requirements, in conjunction with the client’s current infrastructure, architecture, system capabilities and business challenges.
- Responsible for influencing and guiding members of the Sales team to ensure that they are equipped to close deals.
- Provides input to the requirements baseline and investigates, manages and applies authorized requests for changes to base-lined requirements, in line with change management policy.
- Develops the technical design document to match the solution design specifications.
- Leads the scope of work determination, product pricing and RFP/RFI responses and assist with the decision to pursue or abort a deal.
- Manages client proof of concept (POC) initiatives, which require appropriation of appropriate resources, and setup and delivery of the POC.
- Provides coaching and mentorship to junior Technical Architects.
Knowledge and Attributes:
- Advanced product knowledge integrated with deep technology understanding.
- Advanced understanding of the vendor’s products, business and technology positioning.
- Excellent communication skills both verbal and written.
- Ability to establish and create excellent client relationships with their technical expertise.
- Ability to develop and leverage their advanced knowledge of reference architectures.
- Ability to continuously maintain knowledge of trends and development in technology domains.
- Advanced knowledge of the problem domain that their systems are to provide solutions for.
- Advanced knowledge in core frameworks used.
- Advanced understanding of key vendor subscription models such as Cisco EA 3.0.
Academic Qualifications and Certifications:
- Bachelor's degree in information technology, computer science or information systems or a related field.
- Certification and working knowledge of Enterprise Architecture methodologies (for example, TOGAF, Zachman, SOA, ITIL, COBIT, etc.).
- Vendor product, sales and technology certifications.
- Software and programming languages, for example, C++.
- SAFe Scaled Agile certification advantageous.
- Relevant vendor and industry certifications, for example, Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle,
Required Experience:
- Advanced track record as a developer and architect of new systems/solutions.
- Advanced work experience working as a systems administrator or network engineer.
- Advanced client engagement and development consulting experience.
- Advanced experience managing expectations when balancing alternatives against business and financial constraints.
- Advanced experience in a variety of architectures for specific domain or specialization.
- Advanced designer and development know-how.
- Advanced project management experience ensuring timeous delivery of client solutions.
- Advanced experience presenting technical solutions to non-technical audiences.
- Advanced experience working in an agile development environment.