Solution Architect

job description:

This is an exciting time within Hiscox with the organisation going through several large transformation projects. You will play a key role in defining technology strategy and advocating the teams vision, as well as be responsible for project and domain architectures, ensuring that solutions are secure, scalable, performant, resilient and cost effective.

You will be part of a team continually looking to evolve and improve it’s architecture practice and play an important role embedding greater enterprise architecture practice into the group.

You will also be part of a wider group of architects across Hiscox contributing to driving forward the architecture across the group and share and develop ideas and help with the strategic thinking.

You will be expected to lead the design in your specific projects ensuring that this is fit for purpose but also works in combination with the other project deliveries. You will be supporting the project from design through to implementation and transition to BAU to ensure that it is delivering for both business customers and those supporting the systems.

Key Responsibilities:

• 
  Engage actively across the enterprise with a wide range of people, from highly technical software developers to Senior Executive stakeholders. This means the ability to change their style/approach is essential. Identifying what a particular stakeholder needs to know or is concerned about is critical to ensuring that projects address the major stakeholder concerns on an on-going basis.
• Thought leadership in technology, applications and security is essential to ensure that strategy and plans evolve inline with changing business roadmaps and the architecture vision.
• Take ownership of Solution Design and ensure all members of a project team are bought in the vision. Work across internal and external delivery teams and partners. Technical, architectural, functional impact and risk elements of the design need to be conveyed to technical and non-technical members. Presenting options, risks, recommendations in a language and a way that shows understanding and technical leadership is essential.
• Working closely with business domain experts and therefore must be comfortable acquiring and using business domain language and knowledge to convey concepts and recommendations.
• Engage with and assist delivery teams across the whole lifecycle of the project in delivering the Solution. From understanding testing requirements to being involved with the development of solution using a variety of technologies, the Solution Architect is required to be able to engage and operate across a broad range of technologies on premise, on Azure and SaaS solutions.
• Working closely with vendors to ensure there is right technical fit of the solution. This means actively contributing to RFIs, RFPs and subsequently working closely with them in design and implementation of the solution.

Skills/Experience:

• 
  Understanding of Architectural Process; the function of an Architecture Review Board, how to demonstrate architecture principle alignment, implementation governance.
• Design and delivery of Cloud architectures – Azure Preferable
• Ability to influence the direction of the solution
• Being able to adapt and work with a wide range of stakeholders
• Ability to balance architectural purity with optimal solution to meet business requirements
• Creation of technology and application roadmaps
• Understanding of data warehouse architecture.
• Exposure to multiple, diverse technologies and processing environments
• Strong modelling capability with the ability to clearly represent complex ideas graphically
• Understanding of TOGAF, Zachman, Kotusev or similar EA frameworks
• Experience in finance, insurance, reinsurance will be beneficial
• Software Development background will be beneficial.

At Hiscox we care about our people. We hire the best people for the job and we’re committed to diversity and creating a truly inclusive culture, which we believe drives success. We have also learned over the past 15 months that working life doesn’t always have to be in the office, and when it’s safe to do so, we will be introducing hybrid ways of working to encourage a healthy work life balance.

We anticipate the successful candidate for this role will be in the office 3 days every 2 weeks

We see it as the best of both worlds: structure and sociability on one hand, and independence and flexibility on the other.

#LI-SW1

person specification: