Location: London, Potters Bar, Brsitol or Isle of Man (Hybrid working options available)
Are you a visionary with deep technology skills in cloud and modern architecture? Do you have a strong business understanding, ideally in the financial services industry? Are you experienced in defining technology strategies and leading architectural transformations that support digital experience, agility, scalability, and compliance? If so, we want you to join our team.
As a Principal Architect, you will take an overarching view across the whole organization, understanding our goals and enabling the business through technology. Reporting to the Head of Architecture and Strategy, you will collaborate with senior IT leaders, key business stakeholders, and architects to make aligned pragmatic, commercially driven decisions that satisfy business objectives. You will be accountable for the development and delivery of key platform or technology roadmaps and strategies across the enterprise.
Key Responsibilities
- Understand technology needs and propose enterprise architecture "solutions" to meet business strategy.
- Lead the definition of IT strategies, blueprint and guardrails for solutions, creating and implementing technical solutions that meet client, colleagues and compliance needs.
- Define, review, and maintain architectures, ensuring compliance with development, security, or infrastructure standards.
- Resolve significant technology and design issues through all project phases.
- Ensure solutions meet operational requirements and architecture quality standards.
- Provide leadership within the IT and Change Division, championing IT processes, best practices, and standards for architecture in an agile mode.
- Ensure alignment of technology solutions across the organization and understand technology dependencies between projects and products
- Lead cloud and application migration transformations, with a strong emphasis on Azure, to support agility, scalability, and compliance.
What We're Looking For
- Extensive SME knowledge in technology applicable to business areas such as platforms, financial systems, legal systems, HR systems, contact management systems, and policy administration systems.
- Strong experience in cloud and application migration transformations, especially with Azure.
- A strategic thinker, able to define and translate business needs in technology strategy and elaborating roadmap and guardrails to assure quality of products and projects
- Ability to translate technical concepts between software engineering, delivery management, and service management.
- Expertise in making and guiding effective decisions, resolving technical disputes, and turning business problems into technical designs.
- Understanding of the whole context, looking beyond immediate technical problems to identify wider implications.
- Capable of producing strategy for technology that meets business needs and creating, refining, and challenging patterns, standards, policies, roadmaps, and vision statements.
- Knowledge and experience of shifting architecture capability from project to product mindset leveraging agility.
Qualifications
- Educated to degree level or equivalent experience in IT.
- TOGAF or BCS Certification (desirable).