Chief Architect

We’re an energized bunch, who love to be at the forefront of innovation. We make it our mission to develop and stay ahead of the latest trends and technology. Our goal? To put customers at the core of what we do and to deliver solutions that drive transformation and unlock the potential of people and businesses.

Technical Skills:

Cloud Technologies:

You are expected to have experience with building, deploying and operating SaaS products on a public cloud such as Azure, Google Cloud, or AWS. In particular:

- Experience with designing for cloud: microservices, service mesh technologies (Istio, Hashicorp, Netflix, …), hybrid technologies (cloud and on-prem), big data / data lake (Spark), building applications in a PaaS environment;
- Experience with the operational aspects of deploying and operating in a cloud environment: orchestrating / automation tools (Puppet, Chef, Ansible); Kubernetes, containerization, Helm; CI/CD pipelines; supportability, monitoring, ops in general (geo considerations, automation of handling support tickets); accurate cost models to deploy and operate.

Technical Value Propositions:

You are expected to provide your LOB business with guidance on how to correctly formulate and implement technical value propositions. In particular:

- API as a Product: standards for developer experience (DX), API-First design patterns and practices, including tools such as Swagger;
- Data as a Product: architectural blueprints for data collation and processing (telemetry, data lakes, big data, Spark), technical backbones required to support data analytics, machine learning and AI;
- Digitalization: user design paradigms, how to architect for multiple channels (mobile, online).

Enterprise Architecture

You are expected to have experience with large and complex systems and with the typical technical considerations involved in designing such systems. In particular:

- Knowledge of enterprise design patterns and practices;
- Polyglot experience (Java, .NET, C++ , Node/JS/Angular);
- Security best practices;
- Domain-driven-design: identifying bounded contexts;
- Knowledge of BDD methodologies and acceptance testing.

Hands-on and Constant Learning:

You are expected to have a deep grasp of all technologies and patterns you recommend so that your designs are implementable and deliver the promised benefits.

You are expected to be able to have the skills, if required, to personally develop sample applications involving any technology in your blueprint. Such sample applications are to be used whenever there is a need to validate the architecture prior to asking hundreds of developers to follow it, and also whenever they help to clarify technical blueprints to development teams.

You are expected to be monitoring new technologies as they emerge, and to keep yourself current by learning at least two new technologies every year.

Soft Skills

To succeed in your role, you need to engage and gain the trust of all pertinent stakeholders in your LOB, including the General Manager, product managers, business analysts, development managers, technical experts, QA, and dev ops.

In your mission you will be leading as small group of architects and technical experts to define and manage execution of the technical blueprint for your LOB, following standard processes. You will lead architectural decision-making based on pragmatic understanding of trade offs/cost-benefit analysis.

Preferably, you would already have experience with geographically distributed teams.

You also need to be a good communicator and evangelizer at multiple levels:

- Communicate technical blueprints to the developers;
- Actively coach the developers throughout the development process;
- When required, ability to confront and overcome resistance;
- Communicate and justify technical strategy to executives.

This role is to serve as Chief Enterprise Architect responsible for the technical direction of a Finastra line-of-business (LOB), reporting to the Finastra VP of Enterprise Architecture (EA). Your peers will be the other 5 Chief Enterprise Architects for Finastra’s 5 other LOBs, who along with you comprise the Finastra EA Leadership Team.

In this capacity, you own the technical roadmap for your LOB. You are expected to engage with the LOB General Manager, product managers and development heads to determine, validate and communicate the architectural blueprint, patterns and practices that must be followed by the LOB development organization, typically involving 200-700 developers depending on the LOB.

As part of the EA Leadership Team you are expected to contribute to the definition of Finastra-wide EA technical strategy which you and your other Chief Enterprise Architect peers would then consistently apply across all Finastra LOBs. This technical strategy is the technical counterpart to Finastra’s corporate strategy of becoming the #1 Platform in Financial Services. This platform provides a solution to the financial industry’s urgent need to transition business models in response to technical disruption arising from cloud, machine learning, block chain and open innovation.

This is a senior role requiring deep technical expertise along with strong people and process skills.