Sr. Solution Architect

The primary role of Senior Solution Architect is to design and implement integrated banking solutions to enable new business capabilities using advanced technology through innovation and digital capabilities. Performs the leadership, influence, facilitation, analysis, design and solution tasks required for the development of solutions for business problem based on enterprise standards.

Primary Responsibilities and Accountabilities are:

▪  To be a single point of contact (SPOC) as solution lead in engaging stakeholders (Internal to the bank), understanding their requirements, managing their demand and delivering an economically well assessed solution to the business problem in a timely manner.

▪  Develop and maintain strong customer (internal) relations ensuring ''Customers for Life'' relationship with “Go Extra Mile” attitude.

▪  Analyze enterprise business context (trends and business strategy), as well as change requirements in other Enterprise Architecture (EA) viewpoints, to derive the future state for the specified domain area by considering the entire application portfolio covering the domain and defining a roadmap for the optimization. This includes defining the technology domains (covering servers, storage, network, OS, Database, Application Servers, Web Servers, Application Development Environment, Testing, etc.,), standards, principals, guidelines and design patterns & models that guide technology decisions for the given business problems for the enterprise.

▪  Define high-level migration plans to address the gaps between the current and future state of business capabilities, technology, application and data across the enterprise, typically in sync with the IT budgeting or other capital planning processes to assess viabilities of initiatives.

▪  Lead the analysis of the current business capabilities (enabled through applications), technology environment to detect critical deficiencies and recommend solutions for improvement. In addition, lead the analysis of technology industry and market trends to determine their potential impact on the enterprise as well as on the technology.

▪  Provide leadership role and guidance to solution team in assessing various solution options innovatively and facilitate in recommending most economical solution for the given business problem.

▪  Provide leadership guidance with designing the governance activities associated with ensuring architecture compliance.

▪  Oversee or consult on technology implementation and modification activities (for example, projects), particularly for new or shared application/infrastructure solutions. Consult on application or infrastructure development projects to harmonize systems or infrastructure and identify when it is necessary to modify the EA to accommodate immediate or future project needs.

▪  Oversee and facilitate the research, evaluation and selection of business applications, hardware (servers, storage and network) and software technology and product standards (like OS, Database, Application servers, Web servers, etc.), as well as the design of standard configurations.

▪  Conduct market research and provide high-level capabilities, solution approach (Build / Buy decision) and costing (mostly through leveraging industry & technology research & RFI/RFP/RFQ process).

Conduct various assessment like Solutions options, Normalization of functions & features (Like license, etc., Off-premise vs On-premise, etc.), articulate key functional, technical, IT operational, vendor support, etc., among the solution providers.

Deliver solution design and costing for the bank level new initiatives (mostly through RFP process) for an optimal solution to enable stakeholders to prepare a viable business case to seek funding from ITC.

Identify the organizational impact (for example, on skills, processes, structures and culture) and financial impact of the EA.

Document necessary EA design and analysis work, possibly including project postmortem documentation and metric collection.

Conduct technical peer review.

EXPERIENCE

•               Minimum of 6 years of architecture, solution design and implementation experience in IT, with a deep knowledge in a minimum of 2 years of the following business and technical disciplines in banking applications, network design, application development, middleware, servers and storage, database management, and operations

SKILLS

•               Required Knowledge and Skills

•               Excellent interpersonal skills in areas such as teamwork, facilitation and negotiation

2. COMMUNICATIONS & WORKING RELATIONSHIPS (ILLUSTRATIVE NOT EXHAUSTIVE):

Internal:

•               Business Products & Services Owners

•               IT Unit Heads

•               Enterprise Domain Architects Team

•               Enterprise Architecture planning, Standards, & Governance Team •          Internal Senior Technical/Business Forums/Committees

•               Information Security Governance.

External:

•               Technical Teams of Regulators, External FinTech and Other Business Partners Eco-Systems, Technical Consultants, Industry Technology Research organizations, Business & Technology Conference, Seminars providers, etc.

•          Strong leadership skills

•               Excellent analytical and technical skills

•               Strong written and verbal communication skills

•               Excellent planning and organizational skills

•               Ability to understand the long-term ("big picture") and short-term perspectives of situations

•               Ability to estimate the financial impact of EA alternatives

•               Ability to apply multiple technical solutions to business problems

•               Ability to quickly comprehend the functions and capabilities of new technologies

•               Knowledge of many aspects of an EA technology domains (Various Server Technologies, Storage, Network and Software Stacks like OS, Application Servers and Database, etc.,)

QUALIFICATIONS

•               University degree preferably in Computer engineering/Information Technology related discipline.  

•               Masters looked upon favourably but not a pre-requisite

•               Desired skills with TOGAF, Zachman or other framework architectural modelling techniques

•               Usage of architect / modelling tools like Erwin, Visio, SAP PowerDesigner, Mega, ABACUS Avolution, Aris etc.