Solution Architect - IT Infrastructure

Job Title: Solution Architect - IT Infrastructure

Location: Nottingham

Contract: Perm

About the role

We are looking for a Solution Architect to join Technology Services at Boots Nottingham Support Office. Reporting to the Lead Solution Architect, your role will be to produce IT infrastructure high-level designs and proposals in response to internal customer requests and project demands. You will ensure customer requirements are understood and then work with the wider Architect community, service owners and subject matter experts to deliver cost-effective, supportable end-to-end high-level designs, following enterprise strategy, roadmaps, standards, security and service capability.

Main Responsibilities

• Produce high-level designs, concentrating on the consumption on 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 who produce low-level designs and complete builds.
• 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.
• Present at governance bodies, for the approval of high-level designs, along with quality assurance in divisional and broader group IT governance.
• 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.

What you'll need to have

• Broad knowledge and experience of solution areas including infrastructure, transformation and migration, security, business analysis, applications, integration, service management and understands how all of these interact to arrive to an end-to-end solution.
• Ability to 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. You will need to have experience leading workshops and reduce complex ideas to simple terms and express rationale for decision-making to both a technical and non-technical audience.
• Experience with complex projects and programmes, requiring highly available, disaster recovery and business continuity compliant systems in a large international enterprise.

Technical Skills

This is not a hands-on engineering role, but a technical understanding and functional experience in any three of these areas is desirable:

• Azure Cloud technologies.
• Microsoft Enterprise product suite including VDI solution and mobile device management.
• Network solutions.
• Server infrastructure including Windows and Linux operating systems.
• SAP infrastructure.
• Security solutions.