Technical Architect job description

Defining the technical strategy for a product area, and to ensure that this fits with the wider company strategies.

The technical architect must ensure that the product and relevant technology enablers meet both functional and non-functional requirements, and ensure that a product is of a high quality from a technology point of view.

● To be an authority within the product portfolio responsible for the technical specification of projects and choice of technology including the development, integration, testing, infrastructure used and ongoing operational maintenance.
● To interpret product and project requirements and translate these into solutions that can be implemented by the development teams
● To promote the re-use of code, components, and systems in order to ensure that these support the widest range of company products possible and are aligned with technical strategy.
● To ensure that products delivered are supportable, cost effective, meet the department’s strategic business needs, and align to the departmental technical strategy.
● To be a technical authority within a product area.
● To produce clear technical design documentation and diagrams detailing existing and proposed technical architectures.
● To assist the Chief Architect in defining the technical strategy.
● Along with the Chief Architect, to drive and represent the technology strategy to the rest of company.
● To assist the Product Manager by advising on product road-maps to achieve strategic goals.
● To provide technical consultancy, expertise and advice to the development teams and management on matters of technical architecture and infrastructure developments, including their feasibility.
● To assist with improving the standard of technical delivery and competencies within the technical teams.
● To build effective relationships with other technical teams.
● To align architectural solutions with other product groups including collaboration on solution design to ensure fit-for-purpose end-to-end solutions.
● To analyse existing and future product volumetrics and ensure that the architecture is fit for purpose.
● To make significant contributions to the two-way dialogue with platform & operations teams about the ongoing development of the platform strategy.

Required knowledge, skills and experience

● Extensive proven experience in specifying, developing and deploying architectures and infrastructure for software applications in a new media multi-tiered application environment
● Experience in defining and developing high-volume, horizontally scalable architectures.
● Experience in defining, developing, or integrating search systems, leveraging very large data sets, and a thorough understanding of search technologies is required
● Experience of working collaboratively with multidisciplinary teams with a focus on delivery.
● A broad knowledge of existing and emerging technologies and their potential to enhance the performance and robustness of a technical architecture.
● Ability to think strategically and evaluate options in the short, medium and long term.
● Translate business and feature requirements into technical specifications
● Experience of communicating complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
● Experience evaluating new technologies for their appropriateness to proposed solutions, including assessing their strategic and/or tactical benefit to the product or wider department
● Interest in open data, web standards and semantic web.
● Working knowledge of linked data principles.
● Thorough understanding of how the web works.

Desirable skills and experience
● A background in software engineering, database design, or software design and architecture.
● Demonstrable experience developing software in a SOA paradigm
● Experience of the following is highly desirable: Java, PHP, scripting languages (e.g. Python, Perl) and web technologies ( LAMP, SQL), as well as RESTful web services, XQuery, JMS, memcache, Apache httpd server, Tomcat, Cocoon, Linux, HTTP, mod_perl, MySQL, XSLT
● In-depth knowledge of large scale database design and optimisation
● A solid understanding of how to work with different text encodings
● Experience working with structured data formats (e.g. RDF, ATOM, XML)
● Experience leading a technical or multi-disciplinary team
● Experience of supplier management, particularly in procuring agencies or outsource providers to execute software architectures or application designs.
● A knowledge of company products, output, or infrastructure would be an advantage

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