Mobile Architect - Sandton at Discovery Limited

Key Purpose

The mobile architect’s role is to be the subject matter expert on mobile technologies, including Android and iOS, that can support the Vitality Groups technical teams.

Understand and analyze business requirements and provide solution proposals based on a deep knowledge of current systems capabilities, as well as a broad knowledge of available industry-relevant solution components.  Contributes to the overall architecture and standards of the group, acts as an SME and plays a software governance role. 
The architect is also expected to contribute to software development.

Areas of responsibility may include but not limited to

Relationship Management:

• Builds relationships with key customer stakeholders in the Vitality global businesses in order to build trust that will help to ensure deliverables stay on track
• Builds relationships with key systems stakeholders within the Vitality Systems teams to create a collaborative environment in which all stakeholders can constructively work towards and achieve common goals

Requirements Analysis:

• Critically analyses stated customer requirements and acts as a consultant in providing considered feedback based on knowledge of business and systems environments in order to deliver exactly what the customer specified
• Contributes to the Business Requirements Document

Solutioning / Designing:

• Facilitate Fit\Gap analysis and requirements gathering
• Reviews functional design artefacts
• Creates solution design artefacts which include the proposed paradigm and technology, as well as providing priority ranking of the architectural system qualities (re-usability, performance etc.)
• Breaking down high-level system components into lower-level functional components for smaller teams to develop
• Engages with systems architects and development teams to ensure a smooth transition from the proposed solution into the SDLC and through implementation to final release
• Translate logical designs into physical designs taking into account the target environment, performance requirements, existing systems and any potential safety-related issues
• Making design decisions based on business requirements, which take into consideration functional and non-functional requirements of the system
• Facilitate migration planning to move from source to target architecture seamlessly
• Request Technical Debt Dispensation, if required
• Design flexible, scalable, and high-performance mobile app architecture using Flutter and related technologies
• Lead mobile engineers and guide architectural decisions, code reviews, and implementation of features
• Evaluate new technologies and patterns and incorporate them into architecture designs as appropriate

Coding:  

•  Implement the designed solutions in the required development language in accordance with the Vitality Group standards, processes, tools and frameworks.  
• Write clean, modular, maintainable code and enforce code quality and standards across mobile teams
• Identify and resolve architectural and technical limitations, bugs, and other issues

Testing and Post Release Support:

• Continues to be involved post-release in ensuring that the solution satisfies customer needs, both functional and architectural
• Investigate, analyse and document reported defects and correct identified defects

Governance and Continuous Improvement:

• Participate in all review board meetings to assess and provide input to new proposed solutions
• Ensure standards are enforced and are aligned with overall strategic architectural objectives
• Involvement in developing guidelines and standards and in coaching through participation in internal forums to improve methodologies, internal processes and overall architectural rigor
• Research and development – conduct structured search and evaluation processes of market offerings and technologies to stay abreast of technology and competition
• Contribution to enterprise architecture competency
• Develop and implement best practices for mobile development using Flutter, including state management, offline synchronization, networking, device functionality integration, and more

Personal Attributes and Skills

• Solution architecture
• Excellent written and oral communication skills (English)
• Is values driven
• Ability to work in a self-driven, complex environment with multiple and changing priorities
• Ability to focus on deadlines and deliverables
• Ability to think abstractly
• Ability and desire to quickly learn new technologies
• Customer Service Oriented
• Leadership & teamwork
• Creativeness & Innovation
• Stakeholder management
• Clean code thinking
• Is a problem solver
• UML diagramming
• Information Engineering
• Business Process Design
• Data Design
• Application Design
• System Integration Design
• Services Design
• Architecture Principles Design
• Business Rule Design
• Hands on coding experience at a senior developer level
• Web-Service integration experience

Education and Experience

• Science B. Degree
• Architecturally certified (TOGAF or equivalent).
• 10+ years’ experience in mobile application development
• 2+ years’ experience as a solution architect