Your new company

A great opportunity has arisen for an Solutions Architect to join a well respected, not-for-profit sector organisation based in a large service centre in Sunderland.

Your new role

The Solutions Architect will demonstrate competencies across four key dimensions:

Interpret Business Needs

• Translates business and technical requirements into an architectural blueprint to achieve business objectives and documents all solution architecture design and analysis work
• Works closely with the product owners and systems owners to ensure a robust architectural runway that can support future business requirements throughout the product life cycle
• Understands business drivers and business capabilities (future and current state) and determines corresponding enterprise solution designs and change requirements to drive the organisation's targeted business outcomes

Assess Technology

• Monitors the current-state solution portfolio to identify deficiencies through ageing of the technologies used by the application, or misalignment with business requirements.
• Monitors' micro- and macroscopic trends in EA as well as global currents, including economic, political, social/cultural, environmental, regulatory/legal and/or technological disruptions for effective decision-making
• Supports product owners and systems owners in end-of-life product decisions to maintain, refresh or retire services or systems, including applications, technologies, processes and information
• Understands emerging technology trends and disruptions and their practical application to enable new and evolving business and operating models (stretch)
• Analyses the technology industry, competitors and market trends, and determines their potential implications for a given solution (stretch)
• Analyses the business-IT environment to detect critical deficiencies, legacy and technical debt, and also recommends solutions for improvement
• Facilitates the evaluation, selection and TCO of software product standards and services, as well as the design of standard and custom software configurations
• Consults with application and infrastructure development projects and products to fit systems or infrastructure to architecture and identify when it is necessary to modify designs to accommodate the solutions architecture

Apply Technology

• Leads evaluation, design and analysis for the implementation of a solutions' architecture across a group of specific business applications or technologies based on enterprise business strategy, business capabilities, value-streams, business requirements and enterprise standards. This includes the strong focus on integrations (as-is and to-be designs and roadmaps).
• Works closely with the Enterprise Architect to develop a roadmap for the evolution of the enterprise solution portfolio from current to future state, as defined by the broader solutions roadmap.
• Acts as a consultant on a broad range of technologies, platforms and vendor offerings to drive targeted business outcomes
• Creates architectural designs, standards and patterns to guide and contextualise solution development across products, services, projects and systems, including applications, integrations, technologies, processes and information.
• Works closely with the program management office (PMO) or project management office to ensure the execution of plans corresponds with what is being promised throughout the project or product life cycle
• Provides consulting support to project or BAU teams to ensure the project or product is aligned with the overall enterprise architecture

Provide Enterprise Guidance

• Provides deliverables like standard definitions, reference models and architecture designs to support architectural governance to assess the impact of new and ongoing technology investment on the business and IT estate
• Supports a community of practice (CoP), guiding and helping teams, product owners / system owners to align with the overall enterprise architecture governance and assurance
• Designs and directs the governance activities associated with ensuring solutions architecture assurance and compliance (stretch)
• Defines the principles, guidelines, standards and solution patterns to ensure solution decisions are aligned with the enterprise's future-state architecture vision

What you'll need to succeed

• Extensive experience in at least two IT solution development disciplines’ including technical or infrastructure architecture, application development, middleware/integrations, network management, database management or cloud development
• Experience developing architecture blueprints, strategies and roadmaps
• Experience in creating and driving technical solutions to delivery.
• Experience delivering presentations to senior-level executives and technical audiences

What you need to do now

If you're interested in this role, click 'apply now' to forward an up-to-date copy of your CV, or call us now.

If this job isn't quite right for you, but you are looking for a new position, please contact us for a confidential discussion about your career.