Solutions Architect

Full Job Description

Role: Solutions Architect

Location: London (Hybrid)

Remuneration: circa £90,000 plus bonus and benefits

Tenure: 12-month fixed term (to go to permanent thereafter)

The Company

Our client is the premier trade organisation representing firms across finance, banking, markets, and payments in the UK. Their diverse membership includes national and international entities, serving a broad spectrum of customers from individuals to corporates, charities to government bodies. With a focus on customer-centricity, they champion the interests of their members' clientele, ensuring access to essential financial products and services for their day-to-day operations.

Job Purpose

As a Solutions Architect (SA) within the IT department, you'll forge strong relationships with business SMEs to drive successful outcomes. You'll lead technology design activities, evaluating our current setup and suggesting future enhancements.

Your key tasks include:

• Leading technical initiatives such as ERP system evaluation and migrating to MS Office 365.
• Ensuring optimal returns from our technology stack.
• Prioritizing the expansion of our Financial Crime platform on AWS to meet industry regulations by October 2024.

You'll collaborate with internal teams, third-party vendors, and external partners to improve the platform and mitigate project risks. Your role also involves maintaining seamless communication among stakeholders and ensuring alignment with organisational changes.

Duties & Responsibilities

• Responsible for the technical delivery of the Financial Crime platform expansion at all stages, including driving delivery of key milestones and providing status reporting into the programme
• Responsible for developing business and implementation plans as detailed, along with stakeholders
• Experience of running complex, cross-sector projects via a structured methodology, including planning, producing project artefacts and responsibility for budgetary management of external vendors, where required
• Manage dependencies across multiple groups of stakeholders including external stakeholders from the financial services industry
• Drive key discussions with stakeholders and analyse the current landscape for opportunities to articulate and implement creative solutions.
• Monitor delivery and ensure milestones are met. Find effective strategies to remove blocks and delays where necessary
• Have experience in the design and development of PoCs
• Be able to deliver projects from inception to completion often working with a broad mix of individuals and companies with diverse skill sets
• Possess outstanding attention to detail and understand the need for high quality documentation
• Collaborate with various companies (vendors, operators and others) to provide technical recommendations and specifications for wider industry adoption
• Experienced in the Agile methodology and processes with a hands-on approach to assist with the design and prototyping for product backlog and road-mapped features
• Be able to work towards tight deadlines, being personally resilient and able to balance, at times, the pressure of a demanding workload and complex client needs.

Qualifications

• Education to degree-level or equivalent
• Formal project management methodology qualifications, such as PRINCE2 or Agile
• Qualifications such as the Azure Solutions Architect Expert, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure Security Engineer Associate or equivalent from other Cloud Service Providers
• Experience in dealing with IT Transformation projects

Skills & Competencies

• In-depth knowledge of Cloud computing and Cloud-specific patterns, with a track record of developing and designing cloud environments

Technical skills covering some of the following:

• Networking (DNS, TCP/IP, HTTP, CDN, and VPC)
• Containerization and DevOps Tools
• Security
• Artificial Intelligence, including ML, RPA and Natural Language Processing

• Commercial experience with Event Driven Architectures
• Ability to architect applications in AWS/Azure using a wide array of AWS/Azure native components and services in collaboration with third-party commercial tools
• Architecting the digital strategic vision in collaboration with internal teams and third parties, ensuring clear links back to the organisational vision and strategy
• Developing enterprise-level roadmaps for clients, including the creation of enterprise standards, relevant business models, and technology standards
• Expert in ensuring all digital initiatives align with the strategic vision
• Promote and own continuous improvement for cost reduction, application / member appropriate security and efficiency
• Designing end-to-end solutions using a set of robust architecture principles
• Build rapport quickly, creating positive and productive relationships with both internal and external stakeholders
• Have excellent communication and presentation skills, and actively enjoy shaping requirements and communicating technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
• Advantageous: knowledge of Fraud and Scams and Financial Services