Technical Archiect

The Bridge has been assigned by a dynamic consultancy to secure the hire of a Technical Architect to work in their Leeds office. This consultancy aims to be different to other consultancies. To succeed they hire and retain only the best staff, but also have an ethos and culture Embedded in their business that can support delivery of excellence for our customers.

Summary

The Technical Architect will perform a key role in the technical design and delivery of the consultancy's clients overall technical solutions, ensuring that the solution designs are in line with current industry standards.

This individual will provide technical leadership and consulting with the consultancy's clients and its partners in all technical solution design and delivery activities, from technical decision making down to the project planning level, exploiting existing and new technologies and practices in ways that create value for the consultancy and its clients.

The Technical Architect will be customer facing applying a consultative selling approach, identifying client business issues, determine client desired outcomes and architect an information availability solution that utilizes all of the consultancy's services and capabilities, including consulting services, software services, managed services, advanced and traditional recovery services. This involves undertaking key pre-sales technical activities including RFI and RFP responses, technical sales presentation and pitches to C-Level technical and non-technical persons.

The Technical Architect will be responsible for end to end system design and modelling activities across all of the consultancy's projects, including but not limited to infrastructure design, application interfaces, process design and integration design. Further this the Technical Architect works with other of the consultancy's senior management for strategic direction (both conforming to, and helping to define) during system design activities.

The Technical Architect position will be primarily focused on technical design and supporting development of consumer and business related applications and as such will have a expert understanding of Internet and web related technologies, protocols, languages and frameworks.

The role will also provide consultative support to Technical Team managers and their software engineers who are implementing solutions on database, providing expertise and recommendations.

Main Activities

Define the solution design and system architecture for each project as part of the consultancy and supporting overall IT strategy and business strategy for each client.

Provide a solution design(s) to problems, products or concepts required by the business in the most appropriate manner for the given task (eg prototype, document and research).

Evaluate the solution design of all tactical and strategic projects, liaising with business and technology partners, shaping solutions and executing against medium term architectural targets.

Define the consultancy's technical solution design patterns and integration patterns whilst also ensuring those patterns and techniques support non-functional requirements such as security protection, disaster recovery and high availability.

Maintain an up-to-date knowledge of industry and technology, technical design trends and emerging standards. Work with partners/vendors to understand the latest applications and solutions. Where appropriate collaborate with other key partners in developing and testing proofs-of-concept of innovative technology. Drive the adoption of new technologies ensuring that the consultancy remains a high-end technology centric company offering solutions that are unique to the market.

Review technical solutions with product owners and key stakeholders to establish project cost estimates based on defined requirements and where appropriate create high-level design documentation of the technical solution.

Mentor, lead and communicate many teams and colleagues in different types of roles (from director to developer) with the ability to pitch at the level of the audience when explaining technical solution options or issues.

Work with key stakeholders to define and measure key technical metrics to gauge and understand technical solution efficiency. As part of technical investigations use the key metrics as part of decision to evolve the database architecture and strategy, with a clear indication on how those key metrics are going to be improved as part of the future solution design (eg reduce costs or increase performance).

Knowledge, Skills and Experience

Required

• Providing technical expertise and guidance to development teams around system design and coding, ensuring standards are consistency upheld and quality practices are Embedded early within delivery teams

• Working with Solution Architects to ensure that application design principles are adhered to in the creation of any new systems/platforms

• Experience of analysing and breaking down problems and information using structured frameworks and methodologies, such as UML, Flow Diagrams etc.

• Several years architecting enterprise services in multiple industries

• Excellent technical writing, presentation and communication skills.

• Ability to identify and manage, resolve or negate, complex issues and risks.

• Demonstrated experience with Java and other development languages such as Scala, Go, C++, C#, Python, Ruby, Node.js, Scripting language such as Bash and PHP

• Demonstrated experience with source code management systems such as Git, build tools such as Maven and CI tools such as Jenkins.

• Demonstrated experience in relational and non-relational databases, data design, indexing, querying, configuration and replication with one of MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or Redis,

• Demonstrated ability to write unit tests, following TDD. Exposure to BDD

• Knowledge of Internet and networking technologies and protocols, ie IP, TCP, DNS, HTTP

• Degree educated in an software engineering discipline or equivalent industry experience

• Experience of working in a team with a DevOps culture surrounded by lean/agile delivery methodologies

Desired

• Experience of collaborative relationships with software suppliers and third-party development partners, of product/package selection, and of delivering those products into a production environment

• Hands-on experience with business requirements gathering/analysis.

• Expert at designing and developing technical systems for high availability, high performance and high scalability

• Experience with web technologies and frameworks such as HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery, AngularJS, and Grunt.

• Exposure to Linux server configuration and one of Chef, Puppet, Ansible or Salt Stack

• Exposure to virtualisation or container technology and tools such as Virtualbox, VMWare, Vagrant, Docker, Kubernetes, CoreOS, OpenStack, Zen or similar

• Exposure to log management and analysis solutions such as ELK stack, loggly, Splunk, Sumo Logic and monitoring tools such as Zabbix, Nagios, New Relic or similar

• Exposure to IaaS services such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Google Cloud Platform or similar

• Ability to identify and manage, resolve or negate, complex issues and risks & troubleshooting in a large scale, cross system environment

• Exposure to any of Hadoop, Hbase, HDFS or Apache Spark

• People Management

• Provide consultative support to several areas of the business and technical leadership to other consultancy employees as required.