Enterprise Architect

Job description

Working within the IT team and reporting to the Head of Infrastructure, the Enterprise Architect will drive the development of IT strategy and roadmap for Iceland with the governance of all infrastructure change through an architecture design authority.

You will be a Senior member of the team responsible for developing and maintaining current and future state views of the infrastructure providing effective coordination for IT strategic initiatives and development decisions reducing technical debt, sub optimal decisions and cost efficiencies.

Key Accountabilities:

·  Evaluate existing technologies, internal functions and development strategies within Iceland in order to drive standards, processes and best practices suggesting improvements.
·  Facilitate the analysis of the current technical environment to identify opportunities to recommend solutions for improvement / lead the remediation to manage risk and drive operational excellence of existing services.
·  Collaborate with infrastructure and application service owners in defining technology roadmaps and a cohesive future state vision providing leadership, expert technical advice and counsel in Enterprise Architecture (Infrastructure / Application).
·  Ability to act as a design authority and provide an assurance role, ensuring all architecture activities and deliverables (in-house and external outsourced) are produced to a high quality.
·  Road map of current and future state solutions in support of key functions within the organisation, proactively assisting in defining the direction of future projects, programs and strategic infrastructure solutions.
·  Provide architectural consulting expertise and direction to leadership Team and across IT by effectively articulating the principles of infrastructure technology strategy and promoting best practices.
·  Conduct research on emerging infrastructure technologies and trends and their applicability to Iceland make recommendations that increase cost effectiveness and infrastructure flexibility, as well as infrastructure architecture best practice.
·  Collaborate with infrastructure and application service owners in defining technology roadmaps and future state vision from an infrastructure perspective and ensuring that this is cohesive and optimal at an enterprise level.
·  Responsible for the architecture direction and strategy; definition of the technical aspects of projects, to include timely production of architectural designs, high level design, low-level design and blueprints.
·  Enable projects to deliver using agile methodologies while maintaining alignment to technology and business strategy.
·  Communicate requirements of any future technology needs, having dotted-line responsibility for project-specific IT architects (in-house, partners and suppliers).
·  Help integrate business, application, data and technology architectures to create solutions that are cost effective, simplify the landscape, and are compliant with common standards ensuring that new solutions are well integrated and non-disruptive for users & customers.
·  Work with Development, Infrastructure and 3 rd parties to define suitable design patterns for new services to be deployed in Azure; including IaaS, PaaS and SaaS as options.
·  Excellent technical, analytical, and project management skills. 
·  Experience of managing architecture governance forums and ensuring the agreement and maintenance of an organisation’s overall enterprise architecture.
·  Ability to deliver enterprise and solutions level architecture across a large and complex organisation, especially within public cloud and hyperconverged environments.
·  Works under general direction within a clear framework of accountability. Substantial personal responsibility and autonomy. Plans own work, to meet given objectives and processes.
·  Maintains awareness of developing technologies and their application and takes some responsibility for personal development.
·  Have excellent verbal and written communication skills. 
·  Ability to listen, probe, influence, negotiate and build consensus.

Business skills:

·  Excellent technical, analytical, and project management skills. Also, strong leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills.
·  Experience of managing architecture governance forums and ensuring the agreement and maintenance of an organisation’s overall enterprise architecture.
·  Ability to deliver enterprise and solutions level architecture across a large and complex organisation, especially within public cloud and hyperconverged environments.

Technical Skills:

·  An in-depth knowledge and understanding of virtualisation and storage technologies, hyper-converged solutions, disaster recovery and network architecture
·  Good knowledge of the comparative capabilities of various Azure components (particularly between the IaaS and PaaS groupings)
·  Demonstrable experience in design and delivery of a variety of Solution Architecture and strategies for the Cloud, comfortable across the entire technology stack.
·  Comprehensive and high-level understanding of a broad range of current & prospective solutions, able to evaluate/recommend the most suitable and workable future proof solutions.

Qualifications/Previous Experience:

·  Educated to degree level in Computer Science (or equivalent) or related field.
·  Experience in system architecture advantageous.
·  Experience creating enterprise strategic infrastructure plans.
·  Knowledge of ITIL methodologies & IT Service Management best practices.
·  Strong understanding and opinions on how integration has evolved from an on-premise, centralised function towards being a digital, cloud and API-driven capability.
·  Knowledge and experience of hybrid cloud integration approaches, API-led architectures and digital-era integration methodology.
·  A proven ability within an IT environment together with wider organisational teams to of developed technology strategies, roadmaps, and optimised existing/new technology platform architectures.
·  Demonstrable experience of being responsible for the definition and the design of the technical architecture for a large organisation/group structure.

Here at Iceland we offer a very competitive salary along with an excellent benefits package, 25 days holiday, plus 8 days bank holiday, 10% store discount, 30% club individual restaurant discount, flexible hours, a highly subsidised restaurant onsite in our Head Office along with a subsidised Costa.

If this sounds like you and you want to expand your career please apply directly and a member of the recruitment team will get back to you!.