Solution Architect

This is a remote position.

Solution Architecture is tasked with driving innovation within the business, and is expected to deliver on business needs, connecting business requirements with a great understanding of technology.

Our Solution Architecture team must be flexible and skilled enough to cover a wide range of different styles of solution, from the heavily bespoke through to the more SaaS / package centric solutions. Having a team that knows how to build high quality technology solutions is critical for our ongoing success.

JOB PURPOSE

• Lead the solution architecture definition for strategic end to end solutions, working with technical architects covering each solution component, and Enterprise Architects driving the long-term architectural direction.
  
• Lead cross-functional / team collaboration on the definition and alignment of strategic technology change initiatives
  
• Architect and deliver innovative and high-quality solutions across the entire business, delivering proof of concepts and innovation prototypes, and ensuring solutions align to our strategic vision.
  
• Guiding our offshore partners to deliver against agreed designs and ensuring that solution intent is realised throughout the solution build.
  
• Provide technical leadership across the project lifecycle from inception to completion of an implementation.
  

JOB ACCOUNTABILITIES

• Working with external and internal IT and business units to define and document the solution architecture and high-level designs for IT change initiatives.
  
• Engaging with senior business and technology stakeholders to shape high-level requirements and direct focussed business and systems analysis activities to define detailed requirements (functional and non-functional)
  
• Identifying key areas of technical risk or complexity, proposing appropriate Proofs of Concepts (POCs) and Proof of Technologies (POTs) to gain objective evidence to influence the end architectural designs.
  
• Engaging with technical leads/architects and SMEs and other solution architects to understand and define the end-to-end solution architecture.
  
• Clearly communicating defined solutions to internal and external business and IT stakeholders.
  
• Gaining an appropriately deep understanding of the technical solution for each component of your defined architecture, and steering key technology and design decisions.
  
• Assuring and progressing defined solutions through the relevant solution architecture assurance processes, in co-ordination with our Enterprise Architecture (EA) team.
  
• Forming close relationships with Enterprise & Technical architects and maintaining an up-to date understanding of our technology and business domains.
  
• Holding 3rd parties to account to ensure their documentation and designs meet our architecture standards, aligns to our defined end to end solution and meets our requirements.
  
• Collaborating with the Service operations teams to define the support model for platforms and components in the end-to-end architecture
  
• ​Reviewing and assessing aspects of detailed design that deviate from the proposed solution architecture and any published technology strategies, policies, standards etc.
  

Requirements

KEY SKILLS REQUIRED

• Experience of designing / implementing a broad range of technology solutions, Including:
  
• Data centric solutions, including large scale data processing and integration
  
• Solutions that deal with structured and non-structured data
  
• Highly distributed architectures
  
• A broad technical knowledge, with expertise in SOA and micro-services and a good knowledge of at-least one cloud platform like Azure, AWS or GCP.
  
• An understanding of the relative strengths and weakness of web, data and cloud technologies, and common architectural patterns.
  
• Being confident in presenting solution architecture and strategy to both and IT and business audiences and being able to explain complex technical subject matters to business colleagues in a straightforward and effective way.
  
• The ability to break down large, complex problems into smaller more manageable phases or stages in order to deliver tangible outputs.
  
• Good knowledge of compliance and regulatory standards (e.g. GDPR)
  
• Active participation & leadership in a maturing architecture practice / community
  

DESIRABLE SKILLS

• Experience in the market research sector
  
• Experience working with big data platforms and technologies
  
• A background in software development