IT Solution Architect
Boots
- Nottingham
- Permanent
- Part-time
- Produce high-level designs, concentrating on the consumption of existing platforms and services. Working to make sure the agreed business requirements and desired outcomes are achieved in-line with strategy and architecture, are cost effective, deliverable and supportable
- Ensure high-level designs are understood by everyone in the project team, including managed service partners and other shared services who produce low-level designs. Ratify alignment of low-level designs and build work with the high-level design. Re-approval must be sort for any divergence through change control and any ensuing technical debt captured and managed
- Provide technical consultancy and leadership throughout the whole project life cycle. During construction, if issues are encountered, work with the project manager and build teams to formulate alternative approaches and mitigation plans to keep delivery goals on track
- Participate in governance bodies, for the approval of high-level designs, along with quality assurance in divisional and broader group IT governance
- Be an active team member of the Solution Architect team and support colleagues through peer reviews, compliance checks, due diligence, and help promote a 'right first time' culture
- Contribute to the creation and maintenance of design patterns, standards, and design blocks to facilitate wider consistency and promote re-use of design elements, delivery at pace, quality assurance and cost efficiencies
- Public Cloud technologies - Azure Cloud. Full range of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS products including Azure App services, Azure SQL and Cosmos DB
- Microsoft 365 - Full product stack and supporting technologies, including Cloud PC
- Microsoft Enterprise product suite - Windows Server, AD, ADFS, NPS, DHCP, DNS, Cluster services Network solutions -Switching, routing, wireless, load balancers, VPN, MPLS WAN, SD-WAN, QoS, ACI, Azure ExpressRoute
- Security solutions - Email, Endpoint, Web, firewalls, IPS, IDS, WAF, PKI, VPN, MFA and other identity management services
- Server infrastructure - Virtualisation, storage, managed backup, hyper-converged platforms
- Experience in Unix and Linux - AIX and Red Hat Enterprise
- Databases platforms - Oracle, DB2, MS SQL, MySQL, operating in clustered environments
- SAP - SAP infrastructure architecture across multiple SAP components and versions operating across SAP RISE, Azure Cloud and on-premise. Associated experience of high availability patterns, resilience, backup and recovery
- Client mobility - Mobile device and app management, InTune, AirWatch
- Telephony and collaboration -VOIP platforms across an international setting. Microsoft Teams voice integration
- Broad knowledge and experience of solution areas including infrastructure, transformation and migration, security, business analysis, applications, integration, service management and understands how all these interact to arrive to an end-to-end solution
- Ability to rapidly understand the business, commercial and technical requirements to write clear and concise technical high-level designs is vital
- Excellent interpersonal, communication and influencing skills are essential. Must be able to lead workshops and reduce complex ideas to simple terms and express rationale for decision making to both a technical and non-technical audience
- Be looking for a challenging workplace and capable of working in a high-output environment. Has a high degree of self-management and motivation to prioritise multiple tasks and deadlines with competing demands
- Experience with complex projects and programmes, requiring highly available, disaster recovery and business continuity compliant systems in a large international enterprise
- Knowledge of formal methodologies and frameworks - TOGAF, ITIL, AGILE
- Working knowledge of data protection and compliance standards of PCI-DSS and GDPR
- Experience of middleware technologies -Software AG
- Containerisation, microservices and orchestration technologies - Kubernetes, Docker
- Knowledge and experience of identity federation and authentication - oAuth2, OpenID Connect or SAML
- Boots Retirement Savings Plan
- Generous employee discount plus enhanced discounts for Boots brands, Boots Opticians and Boots Hearingcare
- Excellent onsite facilities including staff shop, opticians (including free eye tests for team members), gym, cafeteria and outdoor seating