What will you contribute?
As a key member of the Architecture & Strategy team, this position is responsible for supporting the development and adoption of architectural practices across the IT organization and beyond, into the business, through collaboration.
The development and adoption of these architectural practices will support improved profitability from our managed hosting services, through driving standardized delivery and ensuring correct selling. the establishment of these practices will also enable IT to become more of a partner to the business.
The role is balance mix of the theoretical whilst being practical in the application of the guidance and governance provided by the framework. So, as a practising Solution Architect themselves, the successful candidate will use their skills to guide, support and assist 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:
Supporting the definition, articulation and evangelization of the Architecture and Practices framework including the modular components of the Portfolio, Strategies and Architectures, Architectural Review Board, Cloud Delivery and Cloud Operations.Supporting the definition, application and rollout of Portfolio Management including the patterns on how to include technologies in a way that drives standardization for deployed solutions to improve efficiency in selling, on-boarding, and supporting. This will lead to accelerated time to revenue through the efficiencies gained of taking solutions to market faster and on-boarding Clients faster.Ensuring coherency and consistency across the Strategies and Architectures developed by the team, and in some cases leading or supporting their creation, across the areas including Monitoring, Identity, Networking, Databases, Middleware, Reporting Services, Cybersecurity, CMDB and ITSM.Defining, refining and supporting the articulation of the Cloud Delivery model used by IT groups to define and deliver services across multiple cloud venues, including aspects such as the management plane, segregation, regions, tagging, deployment pipelines, security, authorization, availability, client connectivity, networking, endpoint management, financial analysis and other related items.Supporting the development and governance of coordinated roadmaps for the improvements of the components in the Cloud Delivery model in an optimized and prioritized manner; and measuring the adherence of deployed environments to the asserted delivery model, implementing remediation plans for any gaps that are identified.Supporting the definition and running of the Architectural Review Board as the place where the company meets to agree on common approaches for the delivery of services to our Clients.Supporting the strategy for the initial establishment of the Architectural Review Board that can be expanded in a way that builds upon recognized successes, so that the whole organization is invested and benefits.Support the activities of the Solution Architects that do the planning, designing, and engineering of infrastructure and platforms, including hardware, operation systems, database management systems, network and security – especially in the areas of how to interpret, use and apply the Architecture and Practices framework components in their work.Form partnerships across departments to streamline work processes and improve the speed at which the company can respond to and capitalize on opportunitiesMeasuring the performance of the Architecture and Practices framework against similar high performing teams, especially in the areas of cost model reductions, the number of products that are engaged and benefiting from using the framework, measures of standardization across products and Clients, and the support for business cases for new products.Supporting the validation that proposals are aligned with the defined solution architecture including the service level agreements, sizing criteria and cost modellingSupporting Sales and Marketing with collateral that explains, evangelizes and supports the solution architecture definition, including maintaining the RFP responsesReporting and support for defining and refining Project Managers’ delivery plansRequired Skills & Experience:
5+ years of practical experience in the field of IT Architecture is requiredExperience with cloud service deployments spanning multiple years in highly complex environmentsExpert ability in building analytics and reporting related to cloud managementExpert 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.Excellent customer service and communication (oral / written) skills required.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.Moderate knowledge of scripting languages (powershell, javascript, etc.).Demonstrates problem solving skills through engineering solutions.A cloud certification is required including but not limited to AWS Solution Architect, GCP Architect and Azure Architect
