Solutions Architect - Digital/Agile

Tyne and Wear  ‐ Onsite
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Description

Role Profile: Solutions Architect, Digital Delivery Centre

My Government client is one of the biggest of any organisation in the UK and we run the biggest digital operation in Government. Their digital business runs the IT behind tax and benefits services for 45 million individual and 4.9 million business customers. They are undergoing a major transformation programme, which includes a £200 million investment in digitalisation, so customers can do more for themselves online and in Real Time, on computers, tablets and smartphones, bringing them bang up to date, in line with banks and other large customer operations.

They are building a team of outstanding people who will create and run these new and improved digital services. They will be using modern technology and agile development methods, and release as much of our work as possible as open source software.

In this role you will undertake hands-on technical leadership across multiple teams and work closely with Product Managers, other technical roles and technical teams to understand the needs of tens of millions of users. You will define outstanding integrated digital solutions for new and existing systems, design RESTful APIs, test platforms and ensure systems are robust. You will provide mentorship for all the technical teams within the digital centre and be an active Solutions Architect with software development used to high-volume services. You will work in a fast paced agile environment should be second nature (TDD, Scrum, Kanban etc), doing evolutionary architecture and prototyping, various databases and configuration, deployment and testing solutions.

You will lead the rapid development of user-driven prototypes to identify technical options and inform architectural approaches. You will work closely with other technical roles to build a continuous delivery and improvement cycle, learn from the wider web development community and share knowledge of tools and techniques with technical and non-technical team members here and across government. Alongside the technical skills above, you should have a knowledge of relational and non-relational databases and experience of handling very large data sets, plus managing integration with multiple systems as part of an enterprise architecture.

As a Solutions Architect you will:

  • Work with Service/Product Managers and other Tech Lead roles to understand user needs for new and existing digital services;
  • Lead the rapid development of user-driven digital prototypes to identify technical options and inform architectural approaches, collaborating with other team members to inform the development of test scripts and Design the form/structure of RESTful APIs to enable seamless integration with internal and external systems. Work with Solution Architects to define the content of these APIs;
  • Ensure new and updated platforms, products and transactions are thoroughly tested for performance and are able to handle specified load;
  • Ensure systems are robust, scalable, open and secure, with appropriate overall system design and integration points/APIs in order to deliver a high quality digital user experience;
  • Build a culture of continuous service improvement, ensuring that key systems are regularly analysed, maintained and improved;
  • Have excellent interpersonal skills and the ability to quickly develop strong working relationships in high pressure environments;
  • Produce, maintain and share architectural related documentation;
  • Provide mentoring and coaching within the technical community of practice and/or line management of a small team of technical staff.

Skills and Experience:

  • Comprehensive and recent experience designing and implementing complex software systems, ie is an active software developer and hands on architect currently engaged in architecting and building high-volume digital services;
  • Demonstrable experience with agile methodologies (examples may include TDD, Scrum, Kanban, etc);
  • Solid background in JAVA, RESTful APIs and JSON;
  • Demonstrable experience organising and performing technical prototyping and proof of concepts;
  • Experience sharing knowledge and working in a multi-disciplinary team;
  • Proven record of building and scaling high-traffic websites and/or high volume transaction processing and analysis platforms;
  • Demonstrable track record of successfully taking an evolutionary architecture approach to software systems;
  • Excellent understanding of web technologies & protocols;
  • Experience developing and using web-based APIs (especially REST-based APIs);
  • Experience designing and implementing scalable and robust approaches to caching, security and databases Proven experience in programming and Back End software development including Java;
  • Experience with open source solutions;
  • Experience using and deploying on cloud based platforms;
  • Understanding of web security best practices and security application design, such as OWASP top 10;
  • Understanding of reliable messaging; a clear consideration for how different systems communicate, and knowledge of various functionalities (eg re-routing, mirroring Servers, message queues etc.);
  • Experience in development of digital services on brownfield estates with Legacy systems, understanding how to build leading-edge systems whilst being considerate of potential interactions with existing systems

Desirable Skills and Experience:

  • Experience with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and NoSQL (eg Cassandra, MongoDB)
  • Experience with automated configuration management, deployment and testing solutions such as Jenkins, Puppet/Chef;
  • Use and implementation of modern Front End web programming techniques, such as HTML5, CSS3, AJAX, REST, JSON;
  • Experience using NoSQL, MongoDB, Scala, PLAY, Ruby, Jenkins, Selenium, Jira, Confluence, Linux, HTML5, Django, Spring, Python, Chef and Puppet technologies is highly beneficial;
  • Experience with cloud based container deployments eg docker/LXC;
  • Integration with Enterprise technology stacks, eg Oracle databases, ESB, SOAP-based web services
Start date
ASAP
Duration
4 months +
(extension possible)
From
Mercator IT Solutions
Published at
27.09.2017
Project ID:
1423905
Contract type
Freelance
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