Technical Solutions Architect

About the job

Overall job purpose

To lead the requirements, definition, design, and technical governance of solutions in a platform, pre-sales and delivery capacity. To ensure all solutions are produced according to the customer and/or platform requirements and are fit for purpose.

To lead and own the creation of architectures across multiple hardware and software platforms in a large-scale heterogeneous systems environment.

To act as a thought leader, engaging at a CTO level for the implementation of new services and solutions across the data centre and customer environments.

Main responsibilities:

• Lead engagement with customers and/or internal teams to ensure design of technical solutions are in line with the requirements.
• Lead the process to the customer and/or internal teams to create an IT strategy and technology roadmap.
• Lead in the requirements gathering process and pre-sales phase including due diligence, SoW and solution proposals.
• Work with customers (including running technical workshops) with a view to rationalising the IT estate with offerings from the data centre.
• Work with internal departments and teams to shape services and products offered from the data centre.

Design & Architecture:

• Lead to the high-level design of platform service and customer infrastructures from conception to completion ensuring alignment with business aims and objectives and fulfilling the role of Subject Matter Expert.
• Ensure designs are logical, complete and end to end, fit for purpose and can be abstracted for multiple views and audiences.
• Lead on the creation and maintenance of technology roadmaps taking emerging and future technology advances into consideration.
• Act as a design authority for the overall governance and assurance for all solution designs.

Planning & Transition:

• Act as a technical reference point for Customers, SDM’s, Technical Architects and junior staff members including liaising with the business in the requirements, communication, and support of a technical solution.
• Ensure all designs are created with growth and scalability in mind, anticipating future business needs, changes to the technology landscape in the industry and potential problems that may occur.
• Support on activities and tasks relating to the creation and publishing of Due Diligence reports for customer and data centre technology estates.
• Assist the creation of business and project documents (PID, Gantt, Business Case, RAID, Service Schedule), presentations and workshops to support delivery of solutions to new and existing customers and/or new platform services.

Standards & Guidelines:

• Ensure adherence to appropriate design methodology as appropriate and as specified by the business.
• Assist the management of technology platforms across the datacentre technology portfolio.
• Assist on projects requiring the organisation to achieve accreditations as required by management and/or customer needs.
• Support the production of reference architectures for services offered as part of the data centre offering.
• Actively contribute to the IT governance processes and programmes instituted for customers and data centre platform services.

Documentation:

• Create and own professional documentation for customer engagement, meetings, and workshops.
• Assess the quality and content of technical designs produced as part of customer projects and SCC service enhancements.
• Ensure technical documentation is completed to a professional standard.

Communication:

• Lead all initial customer communications and represent SCC in all high level meetings and scoping exercises.
• Communicate with senior management to coach, report and lead discussions on strategies for existing and emerging technologies and customer needs.

Main requirements:

The ideal candidate will be self-motivated with a track record of working with a datacentre technology stack and an appreciation of support and service transition. Experience of working in a fast paced, dynamic environment with a can-do attitude and able to handle work with multiple customers and projects. Candidate must have experience of working in a large solution provider with a rapidly expanding customer base.

• Experience of performing the role of a consultant, drafting and implementing solutions to business problems and communicating solutions to senior leadership teams across a variety of industries and for large enterprise grade organisations.
• Detailed knowledge of IaaS and PaaS systems architecture.
• Strong background with network, compute and storage technologies in large-scale deployments.
• Minimum 10 years’ experience providing support to enterprise level clients.
• Detailed technical knowledge of VMWare, Citrix/VDI, Networking, Active Directory Services, Exchange, database and storage technologies.
• Willingness to travel (25%).
• Exposure and experience of technical architecture frameworks including but not limited to TOGAF, ISEB and Zachman.
• Experience of customer life cycle management particularly pre-sales, strategy, requirements analysis, technology planning, project management, proposal writing and customer presentations.

Desirable:

• Experience of working in a managed services solutions provider.
• Experience in administration of database technologies in busy transaction heavy environments.
• Appropriate certifications in core technology platforms (MS, VMWare, Storage (NetApp, EMC), Citrix, Networking).
• Qualifications in enterprise, solution or technical architecture to include TOGAF, ISEB and Zachman.
• Experience of delivering IT Strategies to large enterprise grade organisations.
• Exposure to project management and service management industry best practices(Prince2, ITIL, PMP, MSP).