Principal Functional Architect

**Chief Architect**

**Qualification**:
BE/ B Tech, MCA, MBA, CA, MS
** Responsibility**:
Sales Support
- Make presentations and conduct seminars in industry forums.
- Prepare collaterals and publications for distribution in strategic areas.
- Provide support to business development teams in validating proposals, actively involved in creating complex proposals.
- Interact with client to showcase Cognizant capabilities.
- Provides oversight of quality of RFP responses and proposals, including the coordination of multiple resources across Cognizant, validation of financials, appropriateness of Cognizant response and overall assurance of the quality of all response artifacts to the client.
- Market Scan and Brand Building.
- Brings deep knowledge of product, customer business domain within specific industry verticals, including industry business trends and domain best practices, competitor landscape, and market trends OR brings deep understanding of multi tower complex implementations in product of his/her expertise across domains / industry verticals.
- Define priorities towards secondary research on industry solutions.
- Be recognized as an external and internal thought leader at conferences and with analysts / vendors in a larger cross domain/technology area.
- Opportunity Identification.
- Identify the appropriate quality model / standard / measure to be adopted in the project in conjunction with the customer requirements.
- Compare various tools and recommend the best fit for engagements.
- Knowledge Management.
- Design and define Knowledge Management priorities, strategies, and major themes.
- Audit submissions and ensure that all work products, proposals, CP sheets, and other tools are properly submitted, catalogued, and usable across practice.
- Publish and present white papers at external forums organized by product vendor or industry conferences.
- Review the process/methodology for building a repository of domain/industry best practices and.
- Drive a culture to facilitate knowledge sharing and skill building cross the team.
- Solution Engineering.
- Build strong internal networks with Program/Delivery teams to drive appropriate solutioning in a project/program environment with the objective of building new clients, increasing the depth of services offered for existing customers.
- Project Support.
- Play the end to end solution architect role for very large multitower programs or be part of solution advisory council or design review board for large multi tower programs.
- Final escalation point for domain/functional issues for both client and delivery team on multi tower/transformational deals.
- Review audits and consult with stakeholders in resolving audit open items in complex project/program environments.
- Client Management/Relationship Management.
- Owns C suite relationship with client (IT / Business).
- Responsible for client satisfaction, risk and escalation management and providing thought leadership to client on large, complex opportunities/transformational deals.
- Responsible for sustaining relationships at the senior most of reference able clients within the Practice.
- Responsible for ensuring client referenceability.
- People Management.
- Participate in senior level talent selection.
- Set clear and objective goals for team.
- Conduct appraisals.
- Identify, priorities and deploy action items for competency development.
- Review progress on employee engagement activities in the architecture track.
- Direct and guide other managers/team leaders on resolving employee complaints.
- Identify, groom, reward and develop high performers and future leaders - Mentor all functional architects in the product/domain area of his/her expertise.
- Drive capability building for functional architects.
- Building the functional consulting talent pool.
- Business Planning.
- Bring knowledge, understand trends in client requirements and drive strategies to enhance Cognizant capabilities across product, customer domain, process area, identify geographies and qualify opportunities to focus on those with high value/profitability to practice.
- Identify and mitigate high risk impact areas.
- Conduct financial reviews and drive successful CP and PP.
- Solution Conceptualization.
- Possess in depth understanding of market environment, product, customer domain or process area, in order to specify appropriate Cognizant solution offerings.
- Review, finalize, drive the roll out of the newly developed solution/offering and the applicable acquisition/building of infrastructure and talent.
- Incorporate solution into annual business planning cycle, and evangelize both internal marketing of solution to applicable verticals and external marketing of solution to clients.
- Prioritize disruptive business solutions to deliver new capabilities.
- Define business solutions in language meaningful to business leadership.
- Solution Definition.
- Gather leads from the planning process.
- Identify objectives and define th