Position: Lead Solution Architect
Company: Luxoft
Experience required: 3y
English level: upper

Project Description:
It has established a very strong reputation within the market place, and the quality and reliability of its products and its expertise in dealing with unusual or complex stock events is widely acknowledged. It is one of the largest providers of market data, indices, pricing, and analytics. The company is looking to increase its market share globally.

Investment Solution Architecture is responsible for helping translate business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change by providing pragmatic technology solutions and IT Architecture to achieve its business goals. The business continues to grow rapidly via acquisition, so the technology stack is very varied. This coupled with the high appetite for innovation means there is excellent exposure to different technologies ranging from real-time calculation engines to Cloud Native data science tooling and block chain. All new solutions are designed to be cloud first and there is significant investment in this space.

The Senior Architect works with project teams to define innovative, scalable and resilient solutions that are aligned with business and technology roadmaps, championing group standards and policies, and working with internal Investment Solution business analysts and developers, group technology teams and 3rd parties to ensure successful delivery.

The successful candidate will be pragmatic and delivery focused, have a strong technical background, and a passion for technology, emerging trends and best practices.

Responsibilities:
• Produce and promote high quality solution designs and application architectures that are aligned with the team's principles and strategies
• Work with business and technology stakeholders to produce current state / target state, drive transition plans and roadmap creation
• Champion policies, procedures and best practice design principles
• Analysis of business requirements to identify flexible and pragmatic design changes to development and production architecture
• Act as a technical consultant providing technical knowledge, coaching/mentoring, leveraging knowledge of industry trends and best practices
• Participate in vendor selection exercises and gap analysis activities, and where required work with them to understand influence their roadmaps to support strategic objectives
• Understand the balance between business drivers and purity of design
• Where required facilitate and develop PoCs to demonstrate new concepts or technology choices
• Develop positive relationships with stakeholders through the appropriate management of their expectations and agreed objectives
• Work closely with group functions such as infrastructure, information security building relationships and becoming a trusted point of contact
• Take ownership of platform roadmaps, acting as a point of contact for senior stakeholders when exploring new opportunities
• Mentoring and leadership of junior team members, technical leads and external consultants
• Hiring of external consultants to augment the team when there is a need
• Prioritize technical backlog based on the business priorities

Mandatory Skills Description:
It is expected with limited supervision the candidate will be able to deliver each of the key objectives of the role identified above. It is therefore expected that he or she will have:
• Degree qualified in a science or IT based discipline
• Proven technical architecture experience covering common design patterns and platforms such as micro-services, data lakes, APIs, RDBMS and NoSQL databases
• Strong familiarity of formal design and SDLC methodologies, in particular Agile/SAFe
• Significant experience of designing solutions in distributed highly resilient environments
• Significant experience of integrating enterprise application solutions
• Significant understanding of information security concerns and best practices
• Cloud solution design and architecture - both native and IaaS ideally on AWS
• Financial markets experience
• Experience in handling design dependencies on a highly complicated matrix structured organization


• Articulate, energetic person able to work alone or as part of a team
• Excellent attention to detail but an ability to think laterally to solve business problems
• Passion to learn both new technologies and business concepts
• Ability to work under pressure and to tight deadlines
• Creative, results driven, self-motivated, and solutions oriented
• Excellent organizational and time management skills
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills and ability to adapt to business, senior stakeholders, analysts and developers
• Experience of managing or influencing key decision makers
• Able to establish credibility quickly

Nice-to-Have Skills:
• Web and API design and technologies