Senior Solutions Architect

Company: Old Mutual South Africa Published: 16th December 2022 Closing Date: 30th April 2023

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The Senior Solution Architect primarily work in the Digital and Data business to craft a solution that is fit for purpose from a business perspective.
Consequently they focus their attention on the solution architecture capability to make sure that solutions defined operates effectively in alignment to a future-fit enterprise strategy.

Contributes to definition, refinement and documentation of future-fit Solution Architecture patterns and guidelines.
Focusses on the technical and business feasibility of a solution and ensures that it fits within well-established patterns and guidelines as agreed to by the Solution Architecture Chapter.
Takes responsibility for the quality, commercial compliance and technical integrity of the solution being delivered back into the business.
Works actively with software engineers and platform engineers from across the Capability Cluster (both internal subject matter experts and those of the chosen suppliers) to ensure that patterns incorporated are future fit and ensures scalability and resilience of the solution built
Willing to offer mentorship and Guidance) to a small team of solution architects and software engineers.

Compliance

• Provides critical input into the operational readiness and resilience components of the solution.
• Ensures delivery fits within the Solution Architecture patterns and guidelines.
• Provides input to the implementation of new solutions through review and input thus ensuring solutions adhere to agreed Solution Architecture patterns and guidelines.

Continuous Improvement

• Continuous research and development of solution architecture technologies, patterns and designs for scale, resilience and innovation.
• Benchmark and monitor current practices against best practices and implement improvements within allocated area of responsibility.
• Lead initiatives to improve software engineering, quality engineering, and operational excellence best practices in one or more teams/squads.

Financial Control

• Understands the fiscal components of a solution to ensure it satisfies the commercial requirements in terms of capital and operation expenditure.
• Evaluates potential solutions by considering buy vs build options
• Understand and applies FinOps principles as part of the design/architecture process so that spend increases of running infrastructure can be predicted and monitored.
• Defines business cases for technical initiatives and clearly articulates the business value.

Personal Effectiveness

• Ability to explain the complex in laymans terms to bring technology to the masses
• Accepts and lives the company values
• Accountable for service delivery through own efforts
• Collaborates effectively with others to achieve personal results.
• Individually accountable for managing own time, tasks, and output quality for periods of 3 months to 1 year.
• Plans workload vs work demand for a small team of solution architects.
• Leads the design, implementation, and successful delivery of large-scale, critical, or difficult software efforts for the business or that resolves architecture deficiencies, involving a significant amount of work. Requires one or more members of team to execute on architecture and design.

Strategy

• Models and defines the financial implications and considerations of potential solutions.
• Models, defines and collaborates around designs with business and enterprise stakeholders.
• Provides options and recommendations to business stakeholders to ensure that they can make the best business decisions based on the different solution alternatives and patterns.
• Responsible for defining technical strategy and deliver on it with limited guidance.
• Take the lead in identifying and solving ambiguous problems, architecture deficiencies, or areas where your team/squads’ software bottlenecks the innovation of other teams/squads.
• Deliver solutions/architecture simpler.
• Considers the impact of a single business process across multiple system touchpoints and ensures that solution improves the process end-to-end.
• Has detailed knowledge of team/squad software architecture and proactively works to improve consistency and integration between your software and related software (owned by other teams/squads).
• Makes technical trade-offs between short-term team/squad needs and long-term business needs.

Technical Consultation

• Analyses business processes to determine how IT investment could deliver value through improved cycle times, lower costs, improved quality.
• Builds the detailed transition plan for the more effective exploitation of IT investments.
• Defines a solution and ensure that it:
  • Meets the business requirements
  • Meets the non-functional requirements
  • Is based on DevOps, Cloud Based and SRE practices
  • aligns to the guidelines laid down by the Solution Architecture Chapter.
  • Is compliant with the IT strategy.
  • Can be readily leveraged by other parts of the business
• Leverages past development experience to design and architect solutions.
• Works on team/squad architecture. Design and architecture impacts on dependent systems and yields significant performance, availability/resilience, or business value. Your designs, architecture and implementation decisions set a great example to others. You take ownership of outcome. (“You ‘ship it’, you own it.”). You work very efficiently and routinely deliver the right things.
• Solves difficult or complex architecture and business problems. Solutions are extensible. Works to simplify, optimize, remove bottlenecks, etc. You lead design reviews for your team/squad and actively participate in design reviews of related software or other software for the business unit.

Scope of Influence

• Advises Peers, Engineers, Manager, Senior Manager
• Responds to stakeholder needs and influences the development of alternative solutions.
• Influences team/squad software architecture (may extend to related teams/squads).
• Actively mentors/develops others – improving their skills, their knowledge of your solutions, and their ability to get things done.
• Assesses readiness of intermediate/senior software engineers for promotion. You actively participate in the hiring process.

Requirements:

• A minimum of 5 years of experience in relevant IT domains,
• A minimum of 4 years of experience as a digital Solution/System/Domain Architect/Software Engineering
• Hands-on experience in designing enterprise-grade architectures,
• Experience with cloud-native solutions or container technologies,
• Good experience in software architecture/engineering from an overall platform perspective,
• Solid understanding of agile principles and proven experience applying them,
• Matric
• BSC
• IT Technical skills. (Java, Java Script)
• Cloud certification

Competencies:

• Strategic
• Change as a Way of Executing
• Leading with influence
• Collaboration (Diversity & Inclusion)
• Agile Innovation
• Customer First, Personal Mastery (Lifelong Learning)
• Excellent communications skills,
• Strong leadership skills,
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.