Expert Solution Architect

Job Description:

Responsibilities:

What will you contribute?

• As a key member of the Architecture & Strategy team, you will be responsible for the definition and development of solution architectures & roadmaps as well supporting the development and adoption of architectural practices across the IT organization and beyond, into the business, through collaboration.
• Partnering in development and adoption of these architectural practices will improve profitability for our managed hosting services by leveraging standardized delivery and ensuring correct selling.
• The role is balanced mix of Solution Architect & Consultant with sound theoretical knowledge whilst being practical in the application of the guidance and governance provided by our framework. As a practising Solution Architect, the successful candidate will use their skills to provide required guidance, support and assistance to the team that designs, builds, and integrates solutions or platforms spanning moderately complex technical and business capability domains with cost and strategic implications.

Responsibilities & Deliverables:

Your deliverables as Expert Architecture Practices will include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Define and rollout of solution architectures adhering and leveraging patterns, standards, and architecture principles. Driving standardization across deployed solutions and improve operational & delivery efficiency thereby providing better value for clients and supporting sales in accelerating go-to market, clients on-boarding and revenue realisation.
• Engaging with wider enterprise teams like Enterprise Architecture, Product/BU Architecture, Security, and other extended stakeholders to elicit & document functional and non-functional requirements, identifying and mitigating risks & issues, validating assumptions and considerations.
• Supporting the definition, articulation and evangelization of the Architecture and Practices framework including the modular components of the Portfolio, Strategies and Architectures, Architectural Reviews, Cloud Delivery Models and Cloud Operations.
• Ensuring coherency and consistency across the Strategies and Architectures developed by the team, and in some cases leading or supporting their creation, covering various domains like Monitoring & Alerting, Identity Access Management, Networking, Databases, Middleware, Reporting Services, Security, Configuration Management and Service Management.
• Contributing to define and refine the Cloud Delivery model used by IT groups to define and deliver services across multiple cloud venues, covering various aspects like the management plane, tenancy, regions, tagging, deployment pipelines, security, access control, availability, client connectivity, networking, financial analysis, and other related items.
• Support the organization as we bring products to market by taking ownership and providing governance as required for the planning and design of infrastructure and cloud services; network and security services; deployment configuration; databases, middleware, environments provisioning, operating model, audit and regulatory requirements adherence, and deployment plan inputs for Project Managers.
• Creation and maintenance of various Solution Architecture artifacts like Solution Architecture Document, Roadmaps, Cost Model, Support Models, Decision Logs, Diagrams, RAID (risks, issues, assumptions & dependencies) logs in line with Solution Architecture Delivery Framework.
• Maintaining and refining architectures thereby ensuring actual implementations are aligned to defined architecture and its roadmap, maintaining cost models in-line with changes to the deployment architectures.
• Form partnerships across various departments to streamline work processes and improve the speed at which the company can respond to and capitalize on opportunities
• Collaborate in measuring performance of the Architecture and Practices framework by improving maturity in the areas of cost models, number of products that are engaged and benefiting from using the framework, driving standardization across products and Client’s deployment, and reduction of tech debts.
• Supporting the validation of proposed solutions and their alignment to defined solution architecture blueprints including the service level agreements, sizing criteria and costs.
• Supporting Sales and Marketing with collateral that explains, evangelizes, and supports the solution architecture definition, including maintaining the RFP responses

Required Skills & Experience:

• Minimum 5+ years of practical experience in the field of IT Architecture is required
• Minimum 3+ years of practical experience working and architecting solution leveraging various public cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure or AWS, including practical experience in using as well integrating with services offered by the cloud providers.
• Expert understanding of cloud computing architecture, technical design, and implementations, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery models.
• Practical experience of architecting and delivering solution on containerised & orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, Docker etc. Primarily with cloud native offering like Azure Kubernetes Service or AWS EKS.
• Moderate but practical knowledge of scripting languages (PowerShell, JavaScript, etc.) as well YAML & JSON.
• Moderate but practical knowledge in delivering automation for e.g., API driven integration, DevOps Pipelines etc.
• Moderate knowledge regarding various principles like DevOps, IAC, Cloud-specific patterns, Networking especially in cloud hosted solutions,
• Demonstrates problem solving skills through engineering solutions.
• A cloud certification is required including but not limited to Azure Solution Architect, AWS Solution Architect and GCP Architect.
• Experience with cloud service deployments in highly complex environments
• Expert ability in building analytics and reporting related to cloud management
• Excellent customer service and communication (oral / written) skills required (primarily “English” language).
• Strong critical thinking and analytical skills and ability to think “out of the box” required.
• Must be able to work independently or with a team, under minimum supervision.
• Demonstrates problem solving skills through engineering solutions.

Important information:

• Candidate is expected to work in timeslots which will provide better coverage to overlap UK and US time zones.