Principal Solutions Architect, UAE

Lab49 is hiring a Principal Solutions Architect for an exciting opportunity in one of the world's most dynamic business hubs. Advance your career with a unique opportunity and become part of our pioneering team, setting new benchmarks for innovation and growth. Seize the moment to fuel your career and apply today.

Job Summary:

The Principal Solutions Architect will lead the design and implementation of complex IT solutions, ensuring they meet business requirements and are aligned with the organization's strategic objectives. This role involves working closely with stakeholders, including business leaders, IT professionals, and external partners, to deliver scalable, robust, and innovative solutions. The ideal candidate will have a strong engineering background with experience in large integration projects for financial services, be delivery-focused and an outgoing personality. We are looking for a strategic, resilient, natural self-starter. The Principal Solutions Architect will have a passion for solving complex problems and driving digital solutions.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Solution Design and Architecture:
   1. Develop high-level architectural solutions that align with client business needs and technology strategy.
   2. Create detailed design specifications and documentation for proposed solutions.
   3. Communicate architectural visions, goals, and designs effectively to all stakeholders.
2. Technical Leadership:
   1. Collaborate with development teams, Infrastructure, DevOps, IT operations, and other stakeholders to ensure successful implementation.
   2. Provide technical guidance and mentorship to other architects and technical teams.
   3. Oversee the implementation of solutions, ensuring they meet the specified requirements and quality standards.
3. Quality and Standards:
   1. Establish and enforce architectural standards, guidelines, and best practices.
   2. Conduct architectural reviews and audits to ensure compliance with standards.
   3. Proactively identify risks and opportunities in the enterprise architecture landscape. Develop strategies to mitigate identified risks and capitalize on opportunities.
   4. Evaluate and recommend new technologies, tools, and processes, to ensure the organization's architecture remains up-to-date.
4. Client Interaction:
   1. Engage directly with clients to gather requirements, present solutions, and ensure alignment with their business goals.
   2. Develop strong relationships with customers as a strategic partner and technical advisor, contributing to expanding our footprint and securing follow-on work.
   3. Pre-sales and sales support activities.

Qualifications:

1. Bachelor’s degree in STEM. A master’s degree is preferred.
2. Minimum of 10 years of experience in IT, with at least 5 years in a solutions architect role.
3. Proven track record of designing and implementing complex IT solutions.
4. Experience in Commercial/Institutional Banking, financial markets/products is highly desirable.
5. Consulting experience is desirable.

Skills:

1. Managerial/team leadership position in IT consultancy, IT services organization or within large corporations.
2. Large-scale enterprise application engineering experience with current coding skills in one or more of the following languages: Java, .NET, Python or Ruby.
3. Deep expertise in solution architecture including web services, relational and non-relational databases, front-end and back-end technologies.
4. Have 5+ years of experience architecting highly scalable, performant, mission-critical systems with high availability, using container and serverless technologies.
5. Significant system integration experience. Broad understanding of and experience with enterprise middleware and integration tools, both modern and legacy, e.g. Tibco, IBM Websphere, Kafka, Kong, Mulesoft and so on.
6. Good exposure to Agile software development methodologies and DevOps practices such as Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Continuous Integration (CI) and automated deployment.
7. Avid technologist, with deep expertise in modern cloud-native architecture and history of successful implementation of complex public cloud solutions, ideally on Azure.
8. Strong communication skills, ability to present technical ideas in a business-friendly language.
9. Ability to suggest competitive and innovative technical decisions, get client buy-in and deliver commitments.