Principal Solution Architect-Infrastructure

Design, develop and govern the solution architecture of the Group in alignment with corporate business and IT strategies, ensuring appropriate balance between functional, service quality, systems management requirements and business objectives. This necessitates engagement at the strategic enterprise level while also taking full responsibility for the solution architectures implemented by individual projects and programmes.

Job Outline:

- Lead the definition and governance of new corporate and portfolio IT standards, guidelines and practices by analysing and understanding potential impact of competing technologies, assessing their strategic significance, defining their strategic role and scope, roadmap, relationship to existing standards, and periodically reviewing our entire IT estate in the context of those standards.

- Lead the development and documentation of architectural patterns and solution designs for use in solutions.

- Provide expert consultancy and coaching on architectural patterns and solution designs to project teams. Guide and mentor the teams through the entire solution development lifecycle.

- Scout market and track technology advancements and new business innovations, determine how they relate to our IT strategy, existing standards, platforms and patterns, and lead the work to amend existing assets or create new assets to reflect changes in the technology landscape. Showcase business value by executing Proof of Concepts by engaging relevant IT teams.

- Lead the solution architecture development for new initiatives, vendor solution acquisitions, and enhancement of existing systems, taking full responsibility for the quality of the architecture, including integration architecture by aligning to agile architecture development practices. Drive architecture decisions and be accountable for their implications in regard to solution costs, delivery schedules, application complexity, technical debt and overall solution performance.

- Provide expert advice to projects on technical and architectural standards, guiding them on the need to raise exception requests, develop new or amended standards, and on the appropriate use of architectural patterns.

- Lead solution design reviews and technical design reviews, ensuring that projects are following agreed corporate strategic direction and alignment to architectural standards and patterns.

- Provide architecture and technology leadership to development teams by playing the lead architect/driver role in Teams of Teams or Agile/ Release Trains. In addition, be accountable for the overall architecture, solution discoveries, and strategic incubations by coordinating with peer architects and engineering teams

- Manage, direct, inspire and coach the work and capability of Solutions Architect and Senior Engineering resources as required, and engage in, and lead, a much wider virtual team of senior managers, technical and subject matter experts and business managers.

- Own, manage and maintain the architecture roadmap and runways of complex/large projects, technical products, environments and/or platforms. Act as a product owner and be accountable for proactively identifying, prioritizing, and overseeing the development of technical enablers, technical debts, quality improvements, and application modernization activities. Design, develop and govern the solution architecture of the Group in alignment with corporate business and IT strategies, ensuring appropriate balance between functional, service quality, systems management requirements and business objectives. This necessitates engagement at the strategic enterprise level while also taking full responsibility for the solution architectures implemented by individual projects and programmes.

Job Outline:

- Lead the definition and governance of new corporate and portfolio IT standards, guidelines and practices by analysing and understanding potential impact of competing technologies, assessing their strategic significance, defining their strategic role and scope, roadmap, relationship to existing standards, and periodically reviewing our entire IT estate in the context of those standards.

- Lead the development and documentation of architectural patterns and solution designs for use in solutions.

- Provide expert consultancy and coaching on architectural patterns and solution designs to project teams. Guide and mentor the teams through the entire solution development lifecycle.

- Scout market and track technology advancements and new business innovations, determine how they relate to our IT strategy, existing standards, platforms and patterns, and lead the work to amend existing assets or create new assets to reflect changes in the technology landscape. Showcase business value by executing Proof of Concepts by engaging relevant IT teams.

- Lead the solution architecture development for new initiatives, vendor solution acquisitions, and enhancement of existing systems, taking full responsibility for the quality of the architecture, including integration architecture by aligning to agile architecture development practices. Drive architecture decisions and be accountable for their implications in regard to solution costs, delivery schedules, application complexity, technical debt and overall solution performance.

- Provide expert advice to projects on technical and architectural standards, guiding them on the need to raise exception requests, develop new or amended standards, and on the appropriate use of architectural patterns.

- Lead solution design reviews and technical design reviews, ensuring that projects are following agreed corporate strategic direction and alignment to architectural standards and patterns.

- Provide architecture and technology leadership to development teams by playing the lead architect/driver role in Teams of Teams or Agile/ Release Trains. In addition, be accountable for the overall architecture, solution discoveries, and strategic incubations by coordinating with peer architects and engineering teams

- Manage, direct, inspire and coach the work and capability of Solutions Architect and Senior Engineering resources as required, and engage in, and lead, a much wider virtual team of senior managers, technical and subject matter experts and business managers.

- Own, manage and maintain the architecture roadmap and runways of complex/large projects, technical products, environments and/or platforms. Act as a product owner and be accountable for proactively identifying, prioritizing, and overseeing the development of technical enablers, technical debts, quality improvements, and application modernization activities.

Information Technology.

Other : 10+ Years

Degree or Honours (12+3 or equivalent) :

Essential Qualifications and Experience

- Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or an equivalent IT related discipline.

- Experience in Information Technology, Architecture

Knowledge/skills:

- Experience in development of large scale, complex, distributed, mission critical applications in heterogeneous environments.

- Technical leadership in leading a group of technical architects and senior developers. Ability to influence delivery plans based on architecture and skills constraints.

- In-depth understanding of one or more technologies such as Java, ERP, Cloud, open source frameworks, low code platforms, Big data, BI, data warehouses, observability, automation, network and infrastructure, mobile & frontend technologies, AI/ML, container management platforms, database, integration, digital workplace, DevOps. IoT, Blockchain, web 3.0, contact center, mainframe, service management platforms, messaging, cyber security etc.

- Understanding of agile software development methodologies such as SCRUM and Scaled Agile

- Understanding of industry standard software modeling techniques such as ArchiMate, C4 and UML

- Understanding of big picture view, non-functional requirements and design patterns.

- Understanding of architecture styles such as microservices, event driven architecture, cloud native applications.

- Understanding of well architected framework for cloud and on-premise deployments.

- Good understanding and experience in airline domain

- Significant experience of major systems architecture is needed to ensure that a robust and scalable solution is developed - Ideally certification in at least one of the areas - Cloud Architecture, IASA

- Leadership Role : NO

Desired Experience:

- Experience in developing infrastructure strategies and action plans for implementing enhancements, upgrades, or strategic technical enablers with deep expertise in Disaster Recovery / Auto failovers, IT Service Continuity and business continuity planning, resiliency and infrastructure design for mission critical systems and applications

- Experience in implementing infrastructure solutions for on-premises private cloud(Hypervisors – VMWare vSphere/ESXi, VMWare Aria Automation, VMWare NSX-T, Hyper-V, Xen), Microsoft Active Directory, RedHat IDM as well as in public Clouds (Amazon / Microsoft) in multi-DC/multi-AZ and multi-region deployments by working with vendors and internal teams. Also with a focus on Infrastructure Observability/Monitoring.

- In depth knowledge & experience of licensing models, compliance, and optimization on - Databases, Operating Systems, etc across vendors such as Oracle, Microsoft, Couchbase etc running in hybrid cloud(private and public).

- Experience in designing and validating architectural solutions with a principle of “Secure by Design” targeting PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS. Exposure to infrastructure security design best practices for both on-premises and cloud.

- Experience in network architecture, design, implementation and monitoring of routers, switches, load balancers, SDWAN and public cloud network. strong knowledge in storage and backup architectures (tape, cloud, object storage, block storage, Net-backup)