Technical/Solution Architect

Job Title: Technical/Solution Architect

Location: London, EC2

Hire Type: Permanent Position

Salary Offered £100,000 to £115,000 per annum + Benefits

Starting ASAP

Dimensions

This is an exciting opportunity to join one of the largest European investment management businesses.

Our client is currently on a digital transformation journey and require a talented individual to take responsibility for a number of end-to-end technology solutions to deliver strategic business outcomes.

The candidate will be required to put forward roadmaps and designs for an all-encompassing vision for target state technology solutions for the initiatives, and work with several engineering teams spanning multiple technologies to ensure its implementation.

The person filling this position will interact with a number of people in IT, the business and external vendors, so good verbal as well as written communication skills are of paramount importance.

The candidate must be able to identify and resolve issues that are creating inefficiencies or hindering progress proactively.

Principal Responsibilities

• Design Ownership

o Producing and owning the end-to-end design of the solution spanning multiple software components (evidencing at all points how the design answers the requirements - clear traceability)

o Working with engineering teams to ensure detailed component-level design responds to the end-to-end design

o Working with the Senior Architects to ensure that data and functional architectures adhere to the high-level architecture principles and support target state vision for the enterprise

o Working with the IT Infrastructure implementation team to make sure that planned infrastructure adequately supports the software components of the solution

• Requirements

o Working closely with Business stakeholders, Product Managers/Owners and Business Analysts to help translate desired business outcomes into robust system requirements, both functional and non-functional

• Development & Testing:

o Facilitate and participate in detailed design reviews and ensure that all components of the solution are aligned to the target state vision

o Working with the testing team to support the definition and implementation of the testing strategy for the initiative

• Software Delivery

o Working with component developers to elicit, validate and refine estimates for developing the software components

o Planning and coordination of deployment activities across multiple technology platforms

o Overall accountability for delivering technology change is shared with IT project managers

Profile of ideal candidate

Academic Qualifications: Educated to degree level

Experience:

• Substantial experience in software/application development with progressively increasing responsibilities and long-term engagements with employers.
• Track record of designing and delivering solution architecture for data-intensive initiatives spanning multiple technologies, delivered over the course of 2-3 years, and budgeted above £5m.
• Experience of large transformational projects with multi-year system migration planning.
• Experience of the Charles River product and interfaces.
• Experience implementing and integrating 3rd party packages as part of technology solutions.
• Experience with Agile delivery methodologies; working knowledge of the SAFe framework would be a plus.
• Practical understanding and experience of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD).
• Experience working on investment management Front Office systems including portfolio management systems, OMS & trading platforms.
• Understanding of IBOR & ABOR fundamentals.

Specialist knowledge/skills

• Excellent understanding and practical experience of defining, designing and implementing Microservices in an enterprise environment
• Excellent understanding and practical experience of cloud technologies, including PaaS, container platforms (Docker and Kubernetes), Serverless, etc.
• Experience with Red Hat Openshift and AWS of significant benefit
• Experience of Business Process Management (BPM) tools and techniques; ideally using Pega and Camunda
• Experience with a range of modern enterprise application integration technologies such as Apache Camel and MuleSoft
• Knowledge of enterprise messaging technologies with experience of Kafka
• Knowledge of UX/UI design and technologies

In addition, it would be a plus to have exposure to:

o Big Data technology stacks, such as Cloudera CDH/CDP

o Data management and data quality tools

Competence/Characteristics

• Self-starter
• Visual thinker able to communicate effectively with diagrams
• Good facilitation skills, ability to broker an agreement on a contentious issue
• Proactive, can learn'/can do' attitude
• Team & customer focused
• Good attention to detail
• Intellectual honesty