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Globally, South Africa spends one of the highest percentages of Gross Domestic Product (6 percent) on education. Despite significant government spending and charitable investments to reform South Africa’s public school system since the end of apartheid, overall student performance has declined. The traditional South African education system offers li...
Job description
What is the role? Represent the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation in South Africa as the client-facing Technology expert for our programs, utilizing a combination of skills ranging from Systems Engineering to Business Analysis to Product and Project Delivery Management. You are comfortable architecting solutions with our Program Officers and their audiences, including national and provincial government, universities, universities of technology and colleges, fellow foundations and donor agencies, large scale NGOs and top-tier consultancies. We look for candidates who have demonstrated strong business acumen, leadership in operations, outstanding interpersonal and communication skills, and who possess the maturity and judgment to be an effective representative of the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation.
What does this mean? This is an externally facing technology role - to be the trusted advisor on all technical aspects of proposals and projects that we run in South Africa. You will partner with a variety of organizations to design an overall technology vision and execute a plan that turns that vision into a reality. Major responsibilities of the Solutions Architect Role will include;
- Technology leadership and solution architecture ownership
- Technical strategy lead focusing on extensibility & scalability of solutions
- Stakeholder relationship management - specifically bridging relationships between technical and non-technical project members
- Oversight of technical delivery management across multiple initiatives
- Technology infrastructure assessment
- Technology partner evaluation and partner network enablement
- Business requirements gathering, system specification, design and architecture
- RFP review and evaluation
Preferred Knowledge, Skills and Abilities. The ideal candidate will have consulting experience, specifically software implementation experience, and also development project management experience. You must be comfortable influencing and working through systems to produce measurable and sustainable results. This position is not involved in direct software development, but often oversees developers and has a strong understanding of coding concepts. Other required skills include:
- Demonstrated success delivering results and meeting deadlines, in a rapid, evolving and complex development environment
- Proven ability to effectively project manage multiple projects against established milestones and deliverables
- Deep experience in evaluating various technology strategies and architectures to meet short and long-term business objectives
- Experience in leading others and managing multiple outside resources
- Proven ability to exercise sound judgment and work independently on complex initiatives
- Demonstrated ability to build innovative and creative solutions to real problems
- Demonstrated willingness to own the total problem and drive resolution regardless of responsibility
- Polished, persuasive spoken and written communication skills.
- Strong interpersonal skills and customer focus
- Experience in the Public Sector in South Africa will be an advantage
Minimum Requirements.
- Education / Experience: Professional or Masters-level qualification from a leading university with 10 - 15 years of work experience in a leading consultancy or corporate entity.
- Solid understanding of development frameworks, languages, security concepts, version control and code quality tools, including specific technologies like C#, SQL Server, JavaScript and similar.
- Demonstrated ability to think conceptually using strong analytical skills, ability to successfully distill complex technical information into clear business language, to effectively influence a wide cross-section of people, and to identify and implement solutions to address complex business problems.
- Experience in consulting, operations or strategic project management would be desirable.
- Sector Understanding: Prior knowledge of the education sector in South Africa is desirable, but not essential. A burning curiosity to learn about all aspects of education delivery is however, essential.
- A fundamental belief in the power of education and technology to lift people out of the cycle of poverty.
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