Solution Architect in Manchester

Evolutum are looking for an experienced Solution Architect to join a small but dynamic team and provide sound technical leadership in all aspects of their business. You will lead a team of developers to deliver cutting-edge software, bringing them up to speed to continuously achieve the technical targets set by the business.

You will manage the expectations of the business stakeholders, both internally and externally, on achievable targets and work with them to take them through the journey of what our product and deliver. You will be involved in various pre‑sales schemes, facing off to prospective clients to be the technical face of the business.

Responsibilities and duties

• Work on dynamic projects that cover several new products and technologies, but focus on architecting, developing and implementing the core of a cloud and web‑based enterprise platform that is critical in future.
• Design and architect large‑scale distributed web applications and cloud‑based services to meet complex business requirements.
• Guide the development team to build Web Applications with the right architecture and design, yet be pragmatic as required.
• Communicate the target architecture design and roadmap to the team.
• Specify and prioritise development items for the team based on deep understanding of the technologies involved and team objectives.
• Ensure clean design, architectural consistency and exemplary development practices.
• Maintain documents describing the design and make them available to foster knowledge and create agreement on what we're building.
• Develop frameworks, proof of concepts or foundation level code where necessary.
• Provide technical inputs to the product management team to ensure successful product delivery and informed decision making.
• Communicate and drive the implementation of non‑functional requirements to the web developers.
• Promote best practices for software engineering, to ensure solid code and usability consistency across teams.
• Oversee the documentation of the web framework as well as interface design/documentation with external/internal APIs.
• Spearhead our technology trajectory by doing progressive research and prototyping cutting‑edge technologies.
• Write and advocate requirements (features, stories) for projects that advance technology/framework maturity and align to the strategic roadmap.
• Engage in sprint and release planning as a subject matter expert.

Essential Skills and Experiences

• Extensive technical experience in designing and developing enterprise web applications, architecting solutions in a lean/agile way, including consideration of scalability, resilience, partner interfaces, security (risks and threats, authentication, authorization), tuning and testing using automated testing patterns and tools, balancing the need for feature development with architecture.
• Practical experience in a broad range of development languages and frameworks including Java, and a clear understanding of their relative merits and applicability.
• Development experience of artificial intelligence driven machine learning products.
• Skills in developing and designing cloud‑based solutions including experience with web services, REST API, API management and API gateways, AWS including ELB, ASG, EC2, ECS, EKS, authentication and authorisation mechanisms (inc. SAML, Open ID Connect, penetration test tools and remediation of issues found).
• Strong expertise of design patterns, object‑oriented design principles, engineering knowledge, developing frameworks and reusable components and building scalable applications for the cloud.
• Experience of devops techniques and technologies, CI/CD, Jenkins.

Delivery Skills

• Ensuring technologies are used efficiently, profitably and securely.
• Evaluating and implementing new system features.
• Develop technical aspects of the company's strategy to ensure alignment with its business goals.
• Strong development skills are required – a good knowledge of the Java programming language, plus associated tooling such as Maven, Git and a modern IDE such as IntelliJ IDEA.
• We are committed to the DevOps culture, and are well progressed down the line of Infrastructure as Code along with a fully automated build and deployment operating mode.
• We see this as being critical in our ability to react quickly to our customers ever changing and emerging list of requirements, and you will be expected to push this initiative through to its eventual conclusion.

Qualifications

• Minimum bachelor’s degree in computer science or any related field.
• Professional certifications and accreditations (desirable).