Lead Solutions Architect

The Team

We are looking to appoint a Solution Architect to join our existing architecture team within ITS Strategy & Architecture. The team is responsible for architectural design & governance, and translating ITS strategy into design principles, standards and guidance. ITS Strategy & Architecture leads the shaping, understanding and definition of IT need across the University.  It is a specialised team with roles across information architecture, solution architecture, business analysis, and business architecture.

The role

The role will initially be assigned to work within our Evolve programme to provide the University with stable and highly available IT services that enable our current and future needs. The primary focus of this role will be to drive delivery of our “Colleague and Student Compute” and “Environments” workstreams.

Colleague and Student Compute

• An improved experience for students in the PC cluster environments and a more robust service for colleagues.
• A new PC cluster provisioning service, including upgraded hardware, provisioning technologies, and a strategy for PC clusters linked to the Teaching and Learning strategy.
• Processes for preparing and issuing new University-managed devices to colleagues and postgraduate researchers using automation technology.
• Stronger links between IT Services and the Teaching and Learning community for colleague and student computing services.
• Knowledge of technologies such as Parallels, AppsAnywhere and Tanium would be of benefit.

Environments:

• Delivering on-demand, high availability, reusable, stable and managed environments utilising industry-standard tools.
• On-demand & Automated builds for environments for our core systems.
• Improved release management & data obfuscation technologies & processes.
• Robust guidelines, standards and governance.
• Knowledge of technologies such as Nutanix, VMWare and Terraform would be of benefit

The person

You will have great engagement, collaboration and influencing skills and possess an enthusiasm for working within the largest University in the UK. As a great communicator, you’ll be able to use your experience to help others, giving guidance and support to a diverse range of people in realizing and implementing solutions. You will be comfortable presenting highly complex information and strategic plans to groups of varying stakeholders. You’ll have a breadth of technical skills, knowledge and experience across and a broad range of applications, technologies and data. You’ll be comfortable working within a complex, heavily integrated system landscape.  Experience with TOGAF, SAFe or other architectural frameworks would also be desirable, as would a good understanding of modern security principles and processes.

You’ll work within our governance and delivery frameworks, leading the creation of solution architectures across our implementations. You’ll merge project requirements with strategic roadmaps and principles to ensure project success.  You’ll contribute to specific programmes of work, working with Engineering teams and suppliers through the project lifecycle.

The University will actively foster a culture of inclusion and diversity and will seek to achieve true equality of opportunity for all members of its community.

What you will get in return:

• Fantastic market leading Pension scheme
• Excellent employee health and wellbeing services including an Employee Assistance Programme
• Exceptional starting annual leave entitlement, plus bank holidays
• Additional paid closure over the Christmas period
• Local and national discounts at a range of major retailers

As an equal opportunities employer we welcome applicants from all sections of the community regardless of age, sex, gender (or gender identity), ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation and transgender status.  All appointments are made on merit.

Our University is positive about flexible working – you can find out more here

Hybrid working arrangements may be considered.

Please note that we are unable to respond to enquiries, accept CVs or applications from Recruitment Agencies.

Any recruitment enquiries from recruitment agencies should be directed to People.Recruitment@manchester.ac.uk.

Any CV’s submitted by a recruitment agency will be considered a gift.

Enquiries about the vacancy, shortlisting and interviews:

Name: Philip Hornby 

Email: philip.hornby@manchester.ac.uk

General enquiries:

Email: People.recruitment@manchester.ac.uk

Technical support:

https://jobseekersupport.jobtrain.co.uk/support/home

This vacancy will close for applications at midnight on the closing date.

Please see the link below for the Further Particulars document which contains the person specification criteria.