Job Reference: R0016995
To support its breadth, diversity and complexity along with its desire for sustainable and profitable growth our business requires first-class IT solutions and services.
This role exists to partner with senior IT & business stakeholders, understand their needs, layout future state and transition roadmaps then design robust, pragmatic and efficient IT solutions to address those needs.
Duties and accountabilities
- Collaborates with IT Business Leads and Business Stakeholders to develop, maintain and curate the IT Roadmaps across multiple domains.
- Contributes to IT Architectural bodies (Design Authority and Architecture Review Board) ensuring all solutions adhere to Markel EA standards, principles, security, operational and regulatory requirements.
- Provides technology thought leadership and guidance to IT Business Leads and Business teams
- Conducts Business Capability assessments and maps these to current and future state IT solutions
- Captures and analyses specific business requirements and creates appropriate solution designs ensuring all functional and non-functional requirements are properly satisfied. These include Conceptual Architecture, HLD and LLD artefacts.
- Works as part of multiple delivery teams / scrums to ensure projects are delivered to a high standard of quality within the agreed time, scope and cost measures.
- Develops and shapes investment business cases in conjunction with colleagues across Markel
- Builds relationships with architects across Markel globally (Data/Infrastructure/Security/Integration); participates in Enterprise Architecture activities
- Seeks opportunities to simplify, automate, rationalise and improve the efficiency of our IT solutions
- Creates application upgrade, migration and retirement strategies that align to our plan whilst ensuring dependencies, risks are identified and mitigated accordingly.
- Communicates architecture solutions to both technical and non-technical audiences ensuring the communication style used is appropriate for the intended audience.
- Coach and mentor project delivery teams and other colleagues as required to ensure successful business outcomes – act as a domain expert escalation point when necessary
- Engage with the wider IT teams to foster innovation, deliver proof of concept solutions and acceptance of new technologies
- Keeps abreast of technology trends identifying opportunities for commercial benefit
Skills, knowledge and experience
The successful candidate must have:
- A proven track record as a Senior IT Architect in large and complex Enterprises
- Demonstrable experience designing IT solution architectures with corresponding technology phase transitions and migration plans where necessary.
- A pragmatic, resilient and highly driven personality who always seeks to “get the job done”
- Outstanding business engagement & communications skills
- Credibility articulating complex technology concepts and solutions to non-technical audiences
- Experience negotiating and contributing to contracts for the provision of IT systems and services
- Expertise of Microsoft technology stack, platforms and components (o/s, DB, web, application)
- Experience of working within both Waterfall and Agile delivery frameworks
- Experience working with multiple external delivery partners in the execution of IT projects
- Experience working on multiple concurrent projects often with competing priorities
The following skills, knowledge and experience are desirable but are not essential:
- Experience of Insurance Industry processes, applications, solutions & architectures
- Experience of Automation tools / technologies (BPMN / Workflow / RPA)
- Experience of PaaS, IaaS, SaaS deployment models especially in a Public Cloud
- Knowledge of “cloud native” technologies and tooling ideally using Microsoft Azure
- Basic knowledge of the relevant use cases for Enterprise Service Bus tools
- Knowledge of API and micro services-based architectures desirable (this is not a development role)
- Experience of architecture modelling tools (SPARX, Mega, ArchiMate or similar)
- TOGAF or other recognised architecture frameworks
- Prior experience managing projects and/or operational experience would be highly beneficial