OMF IT Solution Architect at Old Mutual

Job Description

The Senior Solution Architect primarily works with the business domain experts and business leadership to craft a solution that is fit for purpose from a business perspective.

Consequently they focus their attention on a smaller facet of service (the solution package) to make sure that it operates effectively as part of the whole as well as independently as a stand-alone solution.

Focusses on the technical and business feasibility of a solution and ensure that it fits within well-established patterns and guidelines laid down by the enterprise architects and solution practice architects.

Takes responsibility for the quality, commercial compliance and technical integrity of the solution being delivered back into the business.

Works actively with senior technology / platform systems analysts from across the operational space (both internal subject matter experts and those of the chosen suppliers).

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 the 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 spending increases on running infrastructure can be predicted and monitored.
• Defines business cases for technology initiatives and clearly articulates the business value.

Personal Effectiveness

Ability to explain the complex in layman’s 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 the team to execute 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 delivering on it with limited guidance.
• Take the lead in identifying and solving ambiguous problems, architecture deficiencies, or areas where your team/squad’s 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 the 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, and improved quality.
• Builds a 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 with 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 impact on dependent systems and yield significant performance, availability/resilience, or business value. Your designs, architecture and implementation decisions set a great example to others. You take ownership of the 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 such as Software Engineering, Software Quality Assurance and/or Business/System Analysis
• A minimum of 4 years of experience as a Solution Architect
• 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
• Relevant Bachelor’s degree or Diploma in Information Technology.
• Cloud certification

Closing Date

• 10 September 2022