Solutions Architect

The Role

We are seeking a hands-on Solutions Architect to join our team who has a passion and expertise in helping us build our next-gen Trading Workstation.  

The ideal candidate is someone who has demonstrated experience in architecting, building and operating highly scalable, available, and fault-tolerant Trading 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 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, roadmaps around solutions, solve complex problems, and act as the technical owner across strategic efforts for which your team(s) are responsible. 

• Project Execution and Applying Technology - Own the services 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 Architecture Guidance - Define the principles, guidelines, standards, and solution patterns to ensure solution decisions are aligned with the firm’s 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 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. 

• 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. 

What We’re Looking for  

• 10+ 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) 
• Adept at building client-side applications using React and TypeScript and have strong experience in designing and implementing GraphQL schemas 
• 5+ years of streaming and event processing architectures and platforms (e.g., Kafka)  
• Have a strong understanding of UX/UI design principles and a passion for creating intuitive user interfaces 
• Ability to plan, estimate, and manage the technical aspects of project execution and delivery 
• Have a product mindset that is deeply empathetic to customer needs, strategic in orientation, and metrics and outcomes-driven 
• Are comfortable working with ambiguity and adapting to changing requirements, with a proactive bias towards action 
• 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. 

Advanced technical expertise and knowledge of  

• Software development with Java, web application technologies (JavaScript and React), event-driven, event-streaming and service-oriented architectures 
• Cloud native application architecture 
• API and microservices architecture 
• Streaming and event processing architectures and platforms (e.g., Kafka, Flink, Spark) 
• Desktop interoperability (e.g., OpenFin, Glue 42) 
• Structured and unstructured databases and usage patterns 
• High-speed, high-volume, high-frequency transaction processing systems 
• Real-time logging, monitoring, and resiliency approaches 
• Automated testing practices and frameworks 
• Process automation approaches and tooling (e.g., DevOps and AIOps) 

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 team.

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. 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.