Job Vacancies at Old Mutual South Africa

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

31 March 2023