Solution Architect (Senior Specialist / Expert)

1. Major Activities: 

• Understands business drivers and business capabilities (future and current state) and determines corresponding enterprise system designs and change requirements to drive the organization's targeted business outcomes. 
• Understands emerging technology trends and disruptions and the practical application of existing, new, and emerging technologies to enable new and evolving business and operating models. 
• Translates business and technical requirements into an architectural blueprint to achieve business objectives and documents all solution architecture design and analysis work. 
• Analyses the technology industry, competitors and market trends, and determines their potential impact on the enterprise. 
• Provides deliverables like standard definitions, reference models and architecture designs to help the architecture review board (ARB) assess the impact of new and ongoing technology investment on the business and IT estate. 
• Acts as a consultant on a broad range of technologies, platforms and vendor offerings to drive targeted business outcomes 
• 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. 
• Creates architectural designs to guide and contextualize solution development across products, services, projects and systems (including applications, technologies, processes and information). 
• Creates reference architectures focused on detailed design principles, decision points, detailed APIs, major systems and dependencies between business and IT. 
• Manages and develops the architecture for a broader scope of projects or products, working closely with application architects that manage and design architecture for a single project or product or initiative. 
• Analyses the business-IT environment (run, grow and transform the business) to detect critical deficiencies, legacy and technical debt, and recommends solutions for improvement (systems of record, differentiation and innovation). 
• Designs and directs the governance activities associated with ensuring solutions architecture assurance and compliance. 
• Defines the principles, guidelines, standards and solution patterns to ensure solution decisions are aligned with the enterprise's future-state architecture vision. 
• Facilitates the evaluation and selection of software product standards and services, as well as the design of standard and custom software configurations. 
• Supports product managers in EOL (end of life) product decisions to maintain, refresh or retire products, services or systems (including applications, technologies, processes and information). 
• Develops a roadmap for the evolution of the enterprise application portfolio from future to current state (as defined by the solutions architecture). 
• Monitors the current-state solution portfolio to identify deficiencies through aging of the technologies used by the application, or misalignment with business requirements. 
• Identifies the organizational impact (for example, on skills, processes, structures or culture) and financial impact of the solutions architecture. 

2. Relevant Knowledge/ Expertise/ Skills: 

• Knowledge of various backend development languages like Java, Go and Python 
• Knowledge of various database technologies like MySQL, MongoDB and Oracle 
• Knowledge of various frontend web development languages like JavaScript, HTML and CSS. 
• Hands-on experience with at least one of following domains: cloud native application development, DevOps practices, highly available and critical system development 
• Knowledge of various aspects of an enterprise technology architecture like business, information, data, network and security 
• Exposure to multiple, diverse technologies, platforms and processing environments 
• Solid understanding of product management, agile principles and development methodologies and capability of supporting agile teams by providing advice and guidance on opportunities, impact and risks, taking account of technical and architectural debt 
• Knowledge of information principles and processes 
• Knowledge of financial models and budgeting 
• Understanding and knowledge of system development life cycle methodologies (such as waterfall, spiral, agile software development, rapid prototyping, incremental, synchronize and stabilize, and DevOps) 
• Understanding and knowledge of IT service management (ITSM) and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) 
• Knowledge and understanding of different modelling languages (such as UML and ArchiMate) 
• Understanding and knowledge of IT standards and controls 
• Excellent understanding of application development methodologies and infrastructure and network architecture