Tech Solution Architect

Business Function

Group Technology and Operations (T&O) enables and empowers the bank with an efficient, nimble and resilient Services and infrastructure through a strategic focus on productivity, quality & control, technology, people capability and innovation. In Group T&O, we manage the majority of the Bank's operational processes and inspire to delight our business partners through our multiple banking delivery channels.

Responsibilities

Subject Matter Expertise- Act as visionary and strategist for solution/application area

•     Survey market landscape for solution/application insights, direction, vendors, and methods

•     Provides expertise to identify and translate system requirements into software design artifacts

•     Make presentations at internal conferences and author internal publications.

•     Act as technology leaders within our wider digital and technology practices, providing thought leadership, guidance and coaching to junior members of team.

Early Ideation - Help business development life cycle by serving as a solution SME to help identify and qualify business development opportunities

•    Provide end to end solution and design details

•   Drive POCs to assess new solution/application paths

•   Lead / participate in product selection process and fit gap analysis

Responsible for the change in delivery and deployment strategy for all

•  Maintain and monitor all aspects of the application:

•  Interoperability

•  Performance and scalability

•  Reliability and availability

•  Application lifecycle stage

•  Technological risks

•  Number of instances / countries

•  Functionality and Capability

•  Maintain and monitor all aspects of the application:

-          Interoperability

-          Performance and scalability

-          Reliability and availability

-          Application lifecycle stage

-          Technological risks

-          Number of instances / countries

-          Functionality and Capability

•  Understand the system process flow of the primary business processes. Give a clear picture of the functionality map and the applications footprint of various applications across the map.

•  Hands-on involvement in Agile, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and outcome-based delivery model is essential.

•  Responsible for the change in delivery and deployment strategy for all 

Methodology and Quality Assurance - Lead development of formalized solution methodologies

• Create, Manage & Update repository for solution/application artifacts

• Interface and coordinate tasks with internal and external technical resources. Collaborate with Project Managers and technical staff to provision estimates, develop overall implementation solution/application plan, and serve as a lead as required, to implement the installation, customization, and integration efforts

• Contribute during project life cycle, from initial kickoff through requirements analysis, design and implementation phases for projects within the solution/application area

• Provide quality assurance for services within the solution/application area

• Write, or direct the writing of white papers that add further insight and thought in the solution/application area

• Drive a target and consistent application architecture across the enterprise and different platforms in the bank considering various business functions & geographic locations.

• Drive application & technical architectures to ensure scalability, data consistency, speed of access, appropriate monitoring & instrumentation

• Translate functional and non-functional requirements into design within the enterprise context; help business and technology define appropriate non-functional requirements and help in assessing the error budget defined.

• Ensure application architecture uses best in breed enterprise wide and open source tools.

• Create deployment strategies for existing and new services based on business objectives.

• Document and create reusable architecture and design specifications.

• Provide strategic and tactical solutions for technical issues.

• Manage different stakeholders to arrive at end-to-end technical design.

• Interact professionally with a diverse people such as management, executives and SMEs.

• Provide technical leadership and guidance to the development team, during the SDLC. Get development team's buy-in into accepting the design to be implemented.

• Ensure that the solution architecture aligns with the roadmaps established by the enterprise architecture, and that it adheres to the enterprise architecture principles. Act as the bridge between Enterprise / Application Architecture and Delivery.

• Document and manage how multiple applications are poised to work together. Involves defining the interaction between application packages, databases, and middleware systems in terms of functional coverage.

• Assists in the analysis of new and existing architectures to ensure engineering platforms meet business requirements

• Assists in the design of overall system and solution architecture, system integration, and implementation strategy to deliver an integrated solution

• Works with both internal and external partners and suppliers to deliver end to end solution

• Contributes to broader architectural governance activities (including but not limited to) participation in peer reviews for other solutions

•  Technically hands on and able to drive POCs on open source and next generation architectural concepts and technologies.

•  Able to do a deep dive on vendor platforms for vendor/ platform evaluation or to solve vendor platform issues.

Requirements

• Demonstrated 10-15 years' experience as a technical specialist

• 5+ years of experience as a solution architect design and implementation of cloud native solution

• Proven expertise in Java, Springboot, React, RDBMS and No SQL DB, Caching and Elastic search solutions etc.

• Proven effectiveness driving complex multi-stakeholder planning processes, driving cross-team programs to desired results, and managing risk.

• Proven competency in strategic leadership, executive communication and influence, organizational agility, cross-team collaboration, drive for results, and written and verbal communications

• Demonstrated leadership abilities; effective in matrix management and team building

• Strong communication and interpersonal skills. Ability to speak to technical-level staff and summarize communications for business stakeholders and executives

• Ability to act as in a consultative manner with both business and IT leaders to align strategy

• Knowledge in technical program management methodologies.

• Experience taking ownership and delivering results in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.

• Deep knowledge and experience in Cloud Native/ API / Micro-services, Agile / Dev-Ops, CI / CD technologies and best practises

• Strong presentation and written communication skills; high degree of comfort with technical and business audiences.

• Understanding of latest cloud computing and data technologies, business drivers, emerging computing trends, and deployment options.

• Deep understanding of Application, Infrastructure and security architecture and non-functional aspects like Performance, Scalability, Reliability and Availability

• Experience of Credit Cards, Commercial Cards, Unsecured Lending and Card Payments

• Has experience of and is conversant with migration from legacy estate delivery to cloud based solutions, DevOps practices and agile delivery method.