GDS Client Technology - Solutions Architect

Job description

The opportunity

We are looking for a Solution Architect, who will be part of the Solution Architecture team within the Client Technology Solution Architecture function. In this role, you will be responsible for delivering solution designs and architectures for key global initiatives hosted in a variety of environments considering re-use, scalability and reliability in alignment with EY’s mission and strategy.
You will holistically evaluate the architecture and apply deep technical expertise to understand the business impact of a technical component, recommending and implementing new solutions, ways of working and technologies to meet business requirements. You will develop relationships across the business to understand requirements, apply deep technical knowledge of solution and technical architecture to solve business problems and work closely with other architecture and development teams to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
In this role you will also create reliable solution plans that include cost estimates and optimized delivery approaches by working with the business, multi-disciplinary teams including our peers in Technical Solution Management and Product Costing.

As a Solution Architect, your key responsibilities are:

·  Provide architecture leadership & subject matter expertise to client engagements focusing on complex & innovative products and reusable assets
·  Develop solution plans, prior to kicking off a project as part of a product life cycle, intended to support business investment decisions which means they must hold the appropriate balance between costs, risks and quality of the product 
·  Create innovative and practical designs that account for the end-to-end technical solution of a system, in line with the business strategy and objectives and within the context of EY’s technology environment. 
·  Work closely and continuously with the business/client to focus on meeting business/client requirements and incorporating broader aspects such as overall product costs/revenue, data privacy & sovereignty, business continuity, information security, integration with other systems, etc.
·  Identify, define and implementing reusable assets and standards. The solution architect is also responsible for adherence to these standards and consumption of reusable assets across products and portfolios
·  Ensure relevant technical strategies, policies, standards and practices are applied correctly across Technology programs/projects and products. 
·  Contribute to the development of architecture governance structures, methodologies and compliance activities
·  Work with the vendors to assess vendor products, understand vendor’s delivery models and assist in implementing them at EY.
·  Ability to work across multiple projects with varied stakeholders.  A Solution Architect sets architectural direction, builds consensus, mediates conflicts providing technical leadership and advisory services to the business. He/she anticipates needs and potential objections and helps to create an environment which solicits positive contributions from all participants: Solution and Technical Architects, engineering teams, product manager, project managers, product analysts, test and project teams, Information Security and Operations.
·  Demonstrate excellent interpersonal communication and organizational skills that are required to operate as a leading member of global, distributed teams that deliver quality services and solutions. 
·  Cultivate lasting relationships across business, IT and vendors / industry analysts to maintain insight into the broader enterprise as well as industry trends.
·  Recognizes industry technology trends and emerging technologies, understands how they apply to EY and can drive their adoption into our organization.
·  Evangelizes and encourages the importance of technical quality, emerging technologies, sharing & experimentation across the org through mentoring, hackathons, communities etc. 
·  Drives an ongoing communication plan to educate stakeholders on the purpose and benefits of solution architecture
·  Guide others in resolving complex issues in solution architecture and solves complex, escalated aspects of a project
·  Monitor the progress and the quality of the project and reviews and develops due diligence to confirm the developed solution complies with architectural design

Skills and attributes for success:

To qualify for the role, you must have:

·  Advanced understanding of solution architecture.
·  Ability to adopt and relate new technologies to the set of problems we face at EY while adhering to security and other EY standards 
·  Ability to communicate solutions, ideas, suggestions to a variety of (business) stakeholders effectively and comprehensibly
·  Strategic business acumen and understanding of organizational strategy 
·  Deep understanding of Application, Infrastructure and security architecture and non-functional aspects like Performance, Scalability, Reliability, Availability,… all the so-called “capabilities” of a system
·  Good understanding of latest cloud computing and data technologies, business drivers, emerging computing trends, and deployment options.
·  Expert-level skills in defining, designing and developing distributed and scalable products and services, including reusable domain-specific microservices on multi-platform /hybrid clouds (such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Rackspace, VMware, or OpenStack)
·  Ability to navigate the EY organization to facilitate work beyond the immediate technical team 
·  Experience with Agile & DevSecOps methodologies; 
·  Excellent project management, collaboration, interpersonal and communication skills
·  A broad understanding of EY Technology, including service offerings, technical standards and policies, technical and business strategies as well as organizational structure
·  Strong collaboration abilities – willingness to share ideas, documentation and leading practices
·  Conceptual and analytical skills – ability to extract, analyze, and document complex business and technical requirements/strategies

Ideally, you’ll also have:

·  Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent in Engineering, Computer Science, IT, Mathematics, Economics
·  A minimum of 10+ years overall IT industry experience 
·  A minimum of 3+ years in a solution or technical architect role using service and hosting solutions such as private/public cloud IaaS, PaaS and SaaS platforms 
·  Experience in architecting and designing technical solutions for Microsoft-centric solutions based on industry standards using (Azure) IaaS, PaaS and SaaS capabilities. 
·  Experience with any claims-based authentication (SAML/OAuth/OIDC), MFA, JIT, and/or RBAC / Ping etc.
·  Knowledge of cloud security controls including tenant isolation, encryption at rest, encryption in transit, key management, vulnerability assessments, application firewalls, SIEM, etc.
·  Managed the end-to-end lifecycles of a project in solution architect capacity
·  Experience with mission critical technology components with DR capabilities
·  Experience with multi-geography, multi-tier service design and management
·  Extensive experience in financial management, solution plan development and product cost estimation
·  Solid business acumen, management and marketing communication skills
·  Significant experience in presenting ideas, products, concept papers to varied audiences
·  Experience coaching and mentoring others
·  Leadership capabilities and proven ability to manage difficult stakeholders
·  Experience supporting peer teams and their responsibilities; such as infrastructure, operations, engineering, info-security
·  Experience with configuration management and automation tools such as Azure DevOps, Ansible, Puppet, Octopus, Chef, Salt, etc.
·  Experience with Software development full lifecycle methodologies, patterns, frameworks, libraries and tools
·  Knowledge of one or more programming and scripting languages such as JavaScript, PowerShell, Bash, SQL, .NET, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, PERL, C++, etc.
·  Experience with relational, graph and/or unstructured data technologies such as SQL Server, Azure SQL, Cosmos, Azure Data Lake, HD Insights, Hadoop, Neo4j etc. 
·  Experience in data movement and transformation technologies
·  Working knowledge of visualization tools such as Power BI or Tableau and understanding of analytics tools including Azure Stream Analytics, SQL Analytics, Data Lake Analytics.
·  Experience with AI and Machine Learning tools such as Azure ML etc.
·  Delivered projects or initiatives using common methodologies especially SAFe Agile but also Waterfall, Iterative etc.
·  Extensive experience in project and/or product management
·  Experience in architecting mobile applications that are either independent applications or supplementary addons (to intranet or extranet)
·  Achieved one or more of the typical Solution Architecture certifications e.g. Microsoft, MS Azure Certification, TOGAF, AWS Cloud Certified, Pivotal, CISSIP, Zachman, ITIL, Cisco, (ISC)2, CEH, SAFe, PMI, and SAP etc.

What we look for:

We are looking for people are self-starters, who can take initiative and get things done. If you can think critically and creatively to solve problems, you will excel in this role. You should be comfortable working with culturally diverse outsourced on/offshore team members which means you may be required to work outside of the normal working hours in your time zone to partner with other Client Technology staff globally. Some travel may also be required, both domestic and international.