Senior Specialist : Solution Architect at Vodacom

The Solution Architect is responsible for designing and leading the implementation of a solutions and capability architecture for a particular business capability / user journey, according to the overall digital vision and target architecture. This role is responsible for the technical analysis and holistic solution design of future capabilities and features, including external dependencies, cross-domain APIs, and technical enablers / stories. This role is responsible for reviewing the target architecture vision and roadmap, evaluating and prioritizing roadmap items, and translating them into designs and non-functional requirements. This incumbent is responsible for providing support to engineering to ensure development of technical stories are aligned to defined architecture paradigms, principles, and patterns.

Your Responsibilities Will Include

• Translate the overall digital vision and target architecture into corresponding solution designs and change requirements
• Design end-to-end solutions and cross domain integration and APIs
• Define non-functional, operational, and quality requirements for solutions
• Define technical stories to enable business capabilities, fostering re-use of existing components, and accept technical features following demos
• Collaborate to plan the release of technical stories
• Provide guidance to delivery teams to ensure alignment
• Facilitate solution compliance to security, privacy, and regulatory needs
• Manage technical debt and technology obsolescence at solution level
• Advocate adoption of new technologies into solutions

The Ideal Candidate For This Role Will Have

• Solution architecture and design
• Feasibility analysis
• Business capability / customer journey architecture governance in agile software delivery
• Technical enablers, integration APIs, and detailed technical and operational story design
• Infrastructure design
• Estimation techniques for scaled agile
• Technology Innovation: scouting, screening and evaluation
• Cost of ownership of technology, application portfolio management
• Web-scale cloud-native architectures including IaaS, PaaSand SaaS
• Design of web-scale architectures and systems of innovation and engagement
• DevOps practices and automation tools
• Artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data technologies and architectures
• Management of technical debt
• Excellent analytical, technical, and problem solving skills, with high-levels of creativity
• Excellent written and verbal communications skills, with both technical and business audiences
• Excellent relationship building, teamwork, and collaboration skills that enables the provision of effective support and guidance across multiple DevOps teams
• Understanding of both the current Telecommunications and digital services market and emerging business and technology trends
• Ability to quickly comprehend the functions and capabilities of new technologies, with natural intellectual curiosity and integrity
• Vendor and technology neutral –driven primarily by long-term business outcomes rather than personal preferences
• Sound business understanding and market awareness
• Ability to understand long-term (‘big picture’) and short-term perspectives of events and change and how they relate to achieving business outcomes
• Strong time-management skills, with the ability to juggle multiple balls

Must Have Technical / Professional Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Systems Analysis, or other related field
• Five to seven years of experience in at least three disciplines, such as business, information, solution or technical architecture, application development, middleware, information analysis, database management or operations in a multitier environment
• Extensive exposure to multiple, diverse technologies and processing environments
• Extensive experience in business capability modelling and technical and solution architecture development in a digital business context
• Experience working with agile methodologies, such as Scrum, Kanban, XP, TDD, and BDD
• Professional experience and knowledge of digital and Telecommunications industries strongly preferred