Sr. Solution Architect

Job Description

What will your essential responsibilities include

- Understanding of AXA XLs existing architecture.
- Understand user requirements (desired output & outcome) and existing environments (current state), and translate these into an architecture and road map.
- Collaborate with customers, analysts, other architects, modelers, developers, testers, partners and vendors.
- Understand the Business Capabilities that are required and translate this to Technical Capabilities and Solution Architecture.
- Assist the customer (and business solutions analysts) to define and declare non-functional requirements for building out solution capabilities.
- Design AXA XLs architecture and solutions to meet business requirements in a manner that balances architectural standards, and implementation and operational risks, with restricted parameters such as budget and time.
- Document solution interactions and relationships, along with basic infrastructure and application onboarding requirements.
- Assist in the creation of cost estimates including implementation as well as total cost of ownership.
- Ensure the future-state solutions have been fully vetted, are performant and scalable, enable agility, can be supported, are cost effective and highly available, and meet the robust needs of the business.
- Ensure security by design to meet Information Security policies, Legal, Compliance, Risk, and Regulatory requirements, and industry best practice.
- Assess vendor tools based on required capabilities, future capabilities, and architecture drivers, and document justification for tool selection.
- Be hands on to demonstrate tools, patterns, security, performance, scalability, etc. in a lab environment when necessary.
- Work with quality assurance team to ensure the testing approach is appropriate for the given architecture and solution.
- Lead design reviews (pre-development) and implementation reviews (post-development) to ensure principles and standards are followed, and that technical debt is managed.
- Create a feedback loop for those who are implementing and interacting with the solutions.
- Participate in the definition of adoption and experience metrics for the solution to measure the success of the solution.
- Present architecture decisions, explain the end-to-end solution, educate others how they can contribute, and provide guidance on tool usage.
- Extract best-practice knowledge, reference architectures, and patterns for sharing with the broader community of Architects at AXA XL and/or AXA Group.
- Document cost and performance metrics for different design patterns, and provide project teams the ability to decide the most appropriate pattern for their requirements, timeline, and budget.
- Participate in the definition and maintenance of Architecture principles and artifacts.
- Engage with tool vendors on their roadmaps and appropriate usage of their tools.
- Engage with industry experts to validate the architecture and designs, and understand industry trends.
- Key part of the role will be driving the solution architecture and design for the AXA XL Ceded Reinsurance Solution.
- You will report to the Head of Digital Factory Delivery.

Required Skills & Abilities:

- Hands on knowledge and experience with architecting and implementing CRM Solutions on Salesforce or similar platforms (Microsoft Dynamics, Pega CRM or similar).
- Effective understanding of Insurance Distribution Models including direct and indirect (e.g. B2C, B2B, B2B2[C/B]), Data Analytics and AI and how these relates to CRM capabilities.
- Hands on experience with architecting and implementing complex integrations.
- Initiates own work receiving broad direction as needed.
- Lead or manage large, long term or complex projects with dotted line responsibility.
- Ability to assess and advise on the departments strategy.
- Self-directedly resolve a variety of novel strategic challenges that have significant impact on organization-wide cost and efficiency with far-reaching impact.
- Relevant years in relevant architecture roles.
- Possess broad and deep insurance and architecture expertise and knowledge of Distribution and Underwriting Domains.
- Understand & be able to communicate business problems & technical solutions in appropriate terminology.
- Excellent presentation, communication (oral & written), and relationship building skills, across all levels of management.
- Effective Organizational skills with attention to detail and ability to handle change.
- Excellent problem solving and analysis skills.
- Must be able to work well under pressure and consistently meet deadlines.
- Ability to work as part of a team or to be self-directed as required.
- Practiced at working as part of a global team (including outsourcing) spanning multiple time zones.
- Knowledge and active use of Agile, SCRUM and Continuous Delivery.

Desired Skills and Abilities:

- Understand cultural differences and be effective working in a diverse environment.
- Passion for learning and prepared to go the extra mile.
- You care about what you do, and what we do.
- Hands-on experience with architecting, implementing, and performance tuning of : Insurance products & services, Azure cloud platform environment, Container & Orchestration platforms, Relational databases and structured query languages, Message queues, streaming technologies, and event driven architecture, Microservices, Integration and ETL/ELT technologies, Reference & Master Data Management, Access control and security.

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