Senior Solution Architect (Insurance)

I’m looking for an established and senior architect to join a leading insurance company who are building upon their existing architecture function. There many projects and programmes of work this year and moving into 2025.

Salary: £130,000 – £140,000 p/a + 25% Bonus + Package

Location: C. London (twice weekly)

The Role

To support the organisation’s its breadth, diversity, and complexity along with its desire for sustainable and profitable growth their business requires first-class IT solutions and services. This role exists to partner with senior IT & business stakeholders, understand their needs, layout future state and transition roadmaps then design robust, pragmatic, and efficient IT solutions to address those needs. The role is pivotal to the IT function and will act as the “bridge” between the various IT delivery groups, the business units and supporting functions such as procurement, Security and PMO

It requires an individual with demonstrable breadth and depth of experience across multiple IT architectural domains. The ability to shape and deliver complex business solutions in an Enterprise context is essential. The ideal candidate will be a “technologist at heart” with a solid, proven IT Architecture background who demonstrates business focus, strong commercial acumen and the ability to focus on the “big picture” whilst being able to detail with lower-level implementation. They should be prepared to work at pace, balance multiple competing priorities and challenge the status quo to achieve optimum outcomes for the business.

Accountabilities

• Collaborate with IT Business Leads and Business Stakeholders to develop, maintain and curate the IT Roadmaps across multiple domains.
• Contribute to IT Architectural bodies (Design Authority and Architecture Review Board) ensuring all solutions adhere to EA standards, principles, security, operational and regulatory requirements.
• Provides technology thought leadership and guidance to IT Business Leads and Business teams.
• Conduct Business Capability assessments and map these to current and future state IT solutions.
• Capture and analyse specific business requirements and create appropriate solution designs ensuring all functional and non-functional requirements are properly satisfied. These include Conceptual Architecture, HLD and LLD artefacts.
• Works as part of multiple delivery teams / scrums to ensure projects are delivered to a high standard of quality within the agreed time, scope, and cost measures.
• Develop and shape investment business cases in conjunction with colleagues across the business.
• Builds relationships with architects across the team globally (Data/Infrastructure/Security/Integration); participates in Enterprise Architecture activities.
• Seek opportunities to simplify, automate, rationalise, and improve the efficiency of their IT solutions.
• Create application upgrade, migration and retirement strategies that align to their plan whilst ensuring dependencies, risks are identified and mitigated accordingly.
• Communicate architecture solutions to both technical and non-technical audiences ensuring the communication style used is appropriate for the intended audience.
• Coach and mentor project delivery teams and other colleagues as required to ensure successful business outcomes – act as a domain expert escalation point when necessary.
• Engage with the wider IT teams to foster innovation, deliver proof of concept solutions and acceptance of new technologies.
• Keeps abreast of technology trends identifying opportunities for commercial benefit.

Essential Skills/Experience

• A proven track record as a Senior IT Architect in large and complex Enterprises
• Demonstrable experience designing IT Solution Architectures with corresponding technology phase transitions and migration plans where necessary.
• A pragmatic, resilient and highly driven personality who always seeks to “get the job done”.
• Outstanding business engagement & communications skills
• Credibility articulating complex technology concepts and solutions to non-technical audiences.
• Experience negotiating and contributing to contracts for the provision of IT systems and services.
• Expertise of Microsoft technology stack, platforms, and components (o/s, DB, web, application)
• Experience of working within both Waterfall and Agile delivery frameworks
• Experience working with multiple external delivery partners in the execution of IT projects.
• Experience working on multiple concurrent projects often with competing priorities.

Desirables

• Experience of Insurance Industry processes, applications, solutions & architectures
• Experience of Automation tools / technologies (BPMN / Workflow / RPA)
• Experience of PaaS, IaaS, SaaS deployment models especially in a Public Cloud
• Knowledge of “cloud native” technologies and tooling ideally using Microsoft Azure
• Basic knowledge of the relevant use cases for Enterprise Service Bus tools
• Knowledge of API and micro services-based architectures desirable (this is not a development role
• Experience of architecture modelling tools (SPARX, Mega, ArchiMate or similar)
• TOGAF or other recognised architecture frameworks
• Prior experience managing projects and/or operational experience would be highly beneficial.