Senior Solution Architect

Responsibilities: 

• Develop application and system roadmaps associated with application transformation and migration
• Develop flexible, adaptable, modular, and reusable solution designs in collaboration with businessstakeholders, business architects and the IT delivery team while ensuring alignment with Global Specialty and enterprise architecture standard.
• Be the accountable individual for the finalisation, acceptance and approval of solutions you lead, by relevant stakeholders
• Support the definition of high-level target operating models, and prepare business cases in collaboration with change and business teams.  Present business cases for technical solutions, for approval, funding and prioritisation
• Support the requirements gathering process to right-size initiatives and solution strategy. Support business process re-engineering with the objective to maximise core product utilisation and minimise custom builds.
• Uphold appropriate solution architecture governance processes and tools while maintaining focus on design patterns and technology standards
• Act as an enabler of Agile and DevSecOps practices in collaboration with program delivery
• Review high-level designs with technical leads and developers, review code, enforce best practices, assist with debugging critical issues, and enforce performance testing to deliver efficient and performant applications with near and offshore partners
• Be the responsible individual to identify technology risk(s) of initiatives you are leading as an architect and develop corresponding mitigation strategies in alignment with program delivery
• Stay current on, evaluate and recommend the use of cutting-edge technologies and methods, considering their technical pros and limitations. Leverage London market and technology trends to identify the business benefits of alternative technical solutions
• Create comprehensive solution architecture specification documents and other required documentation for signoff by governance bodies
• Contribute to architecture repositories (platforms, services, APIs, technical dept, etc.) and promote reuse across the organisation
• Participate in companywide strategic platform communities, ensuring that Global Markets’ needs and requirements are understood.
• Act as a liaison between divergent business and IT teams to bring them together, mentor, share knowledge, solve problems, design common reusable assets and maximise the use of existing capabilities and frameworks
• Work closely with program managers and delivery leads to identify key design activities and owners while ensuring alignment and feasibility
• Support the infrastructure DevSecOps team by defining all non-functional system requirements for the initiative and ensuring that they are met

Knowledge and Skills

• Experience across the insurance lifecycle (e.g. UW, Claim, Policy Issuance, Billing)
• Exceptional analytical and critical thinking skills, with thorough attention to detail.
• Excellent planning, documentation and problem-solving skills.
• Effective communication, facilitation, presentation & negotiation skills.
• Experience of delivering core insurance platform projects (Guidewire preferred) in both greenfield and migration projects.
• Experience designing solutions beyond core insurance platforms, including integrations with document production solutions, ERP solutions, and customer / agent-facing portals.
• Substantial knowledge of the system development life cycle and the scaled agile methodology. Certifications preferred.
• TOGAF certification is a significant plus.
• Demonstrate competence to work at the highest technical level of all phases of system architecture design, using state of the art rule/framework-based architecture, object-oriented component analysis and proficiency in web-based systems architecture, service-based architecture and enterprise application architecture.
• Ability to guide and mentor development teams on sound design and coding principles, best practices in API based, Micro Services and Cloud technologies.
• Experience in integration architectures from Service Bus to API mediation and event bus models.
• Strong knowledge of contemporary technologies and insurance business trends that allows architecture to solve problems in a creative and cost-effective manner.
• Experience developing roadmaps outlining the evolution of the enterprise application portfolio from current to desired state
• Bachelor's degree or above in Computer science or related tech discipline or equivalent work experience
• Deep Knowledge and proven hands-on experience with cloud technologies
•  6+ years of architecture experience in core insurance platforms
• Demonstrated leadership skills

If you are excited about this role but your experience does not align perfectly with everything outlined, or you don’t meet every requirement, we encourage you to apply anyway. You might just be the candidate we are looking for!