The Role

We are seeking a hands-on Principal Solutions Architect to join our Data and Analytics Platform team who has a passion and expertise for building a next-gen Cloud data platform that enables teams to create products at scale and power our application modernization plans. You will be part of the team working on company’s architectural modernization effort, building a data platform for analytical processing, as well as transaction processing. 

The ideal candidate is someone who has demonstrated experience in architecting, building and operating highly scalable, available, and fault-tolerant Data and Analytics platforms across a range of technologies. You should be passionate about technology, architecture, software engineering and quality, and innovatively addressing business problems. You will work with the team to collaborate on software solutions and architecture and ensure exceptional software engineering practices, and good documentation. It’s essential to be willing to take on new skills to meet the shifting demands of accelerating our modernization efforts to the public cloud and Kubernetes world. Feedback from your users should be something that you look forward to, as you will work closely with the Product and Engineering team users to incorporate their needs into the team’s roadmap and use it as a measure of success. A critical success factor is being viewed as a trusted partner and collaborator, including business and technology stakeholders.

We embrace a culture of collaboration and experimentation while striving and encouraging all team members to focus on continuous improvement and learning. We openly welcome diverse perspectives and people who are not afraid to challenge assumptions and prior ways of working.  Otherwise, how do we innovate, learn and grow as a team and individuals?    

How You’ll Help Take Us There

You will demonstrate competencies across five key dimensions:

• Interpreting business needs and setting strategy - Provide technical vision, drive strategy around solutions, solve complex problems, and act as the technical owner across strategic efforts involving the firm’s data and analytics
• Assessing Technology - Facilitates the evaluation and selection of software product standards and services, as well as understanding emerging technology trends and disruptions and their practical application to enable new and evolving business capabilities.
• Project Execution and Applying Technology - Own the services and the Data and Analytics platform your team delivers – from requirements gathering, design, development, testing, to production – and support the platform, while establishing repeatable processes and methods that ensure high productivity, quality, and reliability. 
• Providing Enterprise Guidance - Define the principles, guidelines, standards, and solution patterns to ensure solution decisions are aligned with the firms target-state architecture vision. Create deliverables like standard definitions, reference models and architecture designs to support architectural governance to assess the impact of new and ongoing technology investment.
• Team Leadership - Lead a team of Data engineers in identifying and implementing well-architected, cloud-native solutions that deliver the best possible experience for our clients and engineering teams. Mentor software engineers on the team, and through code reviews, ensure that all work meets team and industry standards.  

What We’re Looking for  

Credentials and Experience

• 12+ years of experience of progressive software engineering experience, with 5+ in solution architecture and 3+ in a cloud computing environment (e.g., applications, infrastructure, storage, data, and platforms).
• Experience with implementation of Data Mesh Architecture and decentralized data ownership
• Designing and implementing ingestion processes for unstructured and structured data sets
• Designing and developing data cleansing routines utilizing standard data operations
• Knowledge of data, master data, metadata related standards, and processes
• Experience working with multi-Terabyte data sets, troubleshooting issues, performance tuning of Spark and SQL queries
• Good understanding of product management, agile principles and development methodologies and capability of supporting agile teams by providing advice and guidance on opportunities, impact, and risks, taking account of technical and architectural debt.
• Experience delivering presentations to senior-level executives and technical audiences.
• Minimum of 3 years of people management experience leading global teams.   
• BS/MS degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related subject. 
• E-trading and financial services industry experience is a plus.
• Experience developing architecture blueprints and strategies is a plus.

Advanced technical expertise and knowledge of

• High proficiency in two of the following: Python, Java or Scala 
• Designing and building complex, highly scalable, reliable data pipelines, using the Big Data ecosystem (Hadoop, Hive, Spark, Kafka or equivalents) 
• Cloud native application and cloud services architecture 
• API and microservices architecture 
• Streaming and event processing architectures and platforms (e.g., Kafka) 
• Structured and unstructured databases and usage patterns 
• High-speed, high-volume, high-frequency transaction processing systems 
• Real-time logging, monitoring and resiliency approaches 
• Process automation approaches and tooling (e.g., DevOps and AIOps) 
• UNIX/Linux OS and scripting skills 
• Infrastructure as code technologies, such as Terraform, Helm Charts and CloudFormation 
• Databases, both SQL and NoSQL (Mongo, Cassandra, etc), and experience in working or implementing purpose-built time series databases optimized for handling time-stamped data
• Knowledge in Docker, Kubernetes is a plus 

Competencies

• A proponent of strong collaborative software engineering techniques and methods: agile development, continuous integration, code review or pairing, unit testing, refactoring and related approaches. 
• Ability to articulate and document architectural decisions and roadmaps at a senior executive level.
• Demonstrated ability to understand the long-term ("big picture") and short-term perspectives of situations.
• Proven ability to build and maintain effective, trusting partnerships with product managers, architects and technical leads for individual products and applications.
• Ability to propose and estimate the financial impact of solution architecture alternatives.

Characteristics

• Trusted and respected as a thought leader who can influence and persuade business, IT leaders and engineering teams.
• Technology neutral: remains unbiased toward any specific technology or vendor choice and is more interested in results than personal preferences.
• Displays humility, drive, intellectual curiosity, and integrity.
• Motivated and driven by achieving long-term business outcomes.
• Ability to work effectively in a team environment and lead cross-functional teams.  

What You Can Expect from Us

• Central Location: based at our city offices near St Paul’s.  
• Free Food: We provide lunch each day of the week when the employee attends the office via our vendor Feedr as well as breakfast cereals, office snacks and drinks from our free vending machines 
• Paid Time Off: 25 days annual leave entitlement plus 2 charity days 

• Reward for your service: We offer a two-week bonus holiday after completing each 5 years of service  
• Core benefits: Besides competitive standard benefits package we offer private medical (PMI) for family, Cash Plan, health screenings, dental cover, 6X life assurance, critical illness cover, income protection, pension, car leasing (Tusker electronic cars), reimbursement for wellness stipend, interest free season ticket loan and a “Share Incentive” plan 
• Tuition Assistance and Professional Training: Benefit from on-demand learning, boot camps, and opportunities to attend conferences 

Collaboration and innovation are integral to our success – it’s how we got to where we are and how we’ll maintain and grow our competitive advantage. We believe this best happens in an office environment. Employees in Technology work in the office 2 or more days a week. This approach still allows for flexibility depending on the business function you work within but also helps us maintain a collaborative office environment long-term