Solution Architect in Newcastle upon Tyne

The Solutions Architect is responsible for consulting with clients and ensuring high quality designs that are practical, deliverable and maintain the integrity of FNZ’s products and services that help clients meet their business objectives.

Specific Role Responsibilities

• Contribute towards business requirements and ensure the underlying business problem is understood throughout FNZ.
• Production of technical and/or functional designs that fulfil the requirements, are commercially viable and technically achievable.
• Participation throughout the software development lifecycle to ensure the project stays true to the design vision and the client’s needs, and that the design is responsive to the challenges encountered during build.
• Maintain the functional integrity of the primary areas of their delivery team.
• Act as subject matter expert for nominated areas of their delivery team.

Responsibilities

Requirements Engineering

• The Solutions Architect will gather, review, validate and provide feedback on requirements for solutions and products, to ensure that the requirement:
• Fully and coherently expresses the underlying business need for change.
• Includes a full consideration of non-functional requirements.
• May reasonably be answered by a development that will be consistent both with existing technical architecture and also the product roadmap (the latter in consultation with representatives of the Product team).

Design

• On allocated projects, the Solutions Architect will be the overall solutions architect and be responsible for the design. On other projects, the Solutions Architect may support other members of the delivery team.
• The Solutions Architect will be responsible for the production and documentation of designs. Designs must:
• Meet all the agreed functional and technical requirements.
• Take account of and meet the agreed non-functional requirements.
• Be documented fully according to FNZ standards for design documentation.
• Utilise the technology framework in which products are built.
• Be clearly and easily traceable to the requirements.
• Deliver usable functionality e.g. intuitive, transparent, easy to test, maintainable, recoverable.
• Be consistent with the functional and data architectures of all of FNZ’s products.
• Correctly utilise existing software components and as necessary refactor such components to generalise their function.
• Review and provide constructive feedback and help to ensure the high quality of designs done by others within the delivery teams.
• Contribute to wider FNZ design meetings, including sharing best practices, sharing architectural decisions and gathering feedback on proposed designs, and providing constructive feedback to designs from others.
• Use best practice principles of good software architecture.

Project build and delivery participation

• The Solution Architect will remain a participant in all software projects for which they act as designer, throughout the build, delivery, implementation and support phases of that project. In this capacity the Solution Architect will:
• Provide a handover of the design to the delivery team via Design Walkthroughs and help lead estimation sessions.
• Provide client walkthroughs and demos.
• Be available to both the delivery team and external stakeholders such as the regression testing team, releases, documentation, implementation, consultancy and support to answer questions about the design.
• Ensure that the design is built correctly.
• Amend the design if problems emerge during the build and test phases.
• Participate in development and test activities on a project where extra capacity is required.

Product Owner Responsibilities

• The Solution Architect will also:
• Ensure that changes within their stream support the product vision and strategy.
• Support and assist the sales and marketing team throughout the sales process, including software demonstrations.
• Participate in product webinars.
• Develop other people’s expertise in primary areas of responsibilities.
• Assist Delivery and Project Managers in putting project plans together.
• Raise any issues encountered promptly with key stakeholders.
• Fulfil the Product Owner role on Scrum projects.

Other Duties

• The Solution Architect may also be required to:
• Document existing designs within an FNZ product where full such documentation does not already exist.
• Act as a consultant in areas of expertise, both internally and externally to clients.
• Devise and deliver training courses in areas of expertise.
• Assist the production support team in the triage of client support issues in their teams functional areas.
• Help mentor more junior members of the team.

Essential Requirements

• Significant relevant prior development experience ideally in RPG and Java (5+ years).
• Customer facing experience.
• Significant experience with Figaro (5+ years) in either a development or a consultancy environment.
• Significant knowledge of the financial industry.
• Experience of mentoring more junior members of a team.
• Confident, and able to take initiative given client and delivery focused environment.
• Commercially aware.
• Excellent organisational, administration and time management skills.
• Good team communication skills, confident in dealing with internal and external clients.
• Highly developed written and oral communication skills.
• Superior analytical thinking and problem solving.