Lead System Architect

Our industry is currently experiencing unprecedented innovation and a drive towards digitalisation. WTW continuously strives to be at the forefront of this revolution with its Insurance Consulting and Technology (ICT) business. Now is therefore the perfect opportunity to become part of ICT and join a global and growing organisation. We are developing world-class, leading-edge risk analytics solutions and financial modeling software which is used by over 1,000 major insurance clients worldwide as well as many of the largest financial services companies.

We are looking for a Lead System Architect to join our team and help us deliver modern cloud-based reserving application.

As a Lead System Architect, you will join a substantial global engineering organization and provide strategic architectural leadership for a Product Family. Each Product Family consists of several highly skilled development teams following Agile methodologies to deliver market-leading insurance solutions.
You will have experience as a System Architect and have started your career as a software engineer working across a wide range of technologies to deliver complex commercial applications. You will have subsequently progressed into architectural and design-focused positions and demonstrated architectural leadership and experience in successfully delivering increasingly complex products and solutions whilst working with a large team of stakeholders. You will have a successful track record over several years of guiding and mentoring multi-disciplinary teams of software professionals in terms of systems design and architectural best practices.

Key to the role is having a strategic bias, where you will propose and effectively implement key engineering and technology architectures in partnership with a mature Product Management and Engineering Management team. The role requires:

• Business exposure/experience with a strong commercial awareness and focus. Someone who can straddle the business and technical worlds and build relationships and bridges between those two aspects.
• Work well within a matrix environment, influencing wider stakeholders outside the direct product team.
• An innovator, capable of assessing disruptive market forces and/or technology and identifying application and implementation within an ISV business context.
• An appreciation for Enterprise Architecture concepts, including but not limited to the importance and relevance of people, processes and technology within an Enterprise environment.
  

As a Lead System Architect, you will:

• Work with Product Management and other key stakeholders to influence and define the product and technology roadmaps, ensuring technology evolution and technical debt reduction are considered as part of the product backlogs
• Develop the overall technical end-to-end design of the allocated components, products, solutions and services for a group of products. You will be responsible for ensuring the deliverables work according to the requirements and business need.
• Work with Engineering teams to assess existing architectures and define short- and long-term strategy that converge both Product and Engineering needs into a coherent cloud-based/SaaS solution across multiple applications
• Work with a global Product Family Leadership Team in defining a realistic development roadmap.
• Produce and maintain an architecture overview indicating system boundary, key interfaces, key components and technology choices in line with corporate and Insurance Consulting and Technology Architecture standards.
• Be responsible for the identification and oversight of key internally developed components which are owned by the project team (s) but may be shared with other product families.
• Be responsible for technology choices and selection of all third-party components (some of this may be delegated but accountability for the choices remains with the System Architect).
• Ensure the creation and maintenance of architectures that support easy revision, evolution, and extension.
• Be responsible for scalability and performance.
• Responsible for adherence to security & data privacy standards and best practice.
• Work with various Technology Architects to ensure services aspects of the above are adequately covered, and ensures design for easy deployment, operation and supportability. Bring your experiences and best practices in the Cloud within enterprise grade solutions
• Act as a member of the strategic leadership team for a Product Family alongside the Global Product Lead (GPL), Technical Product Lead (TPL) and Technology Delivery Director(TDD).
• Assess technology options against technical and non-technical criteria, and to define robust and scalable architectures supporting the evolution of existing products and the creation of new innovative solutions.
• Provide support to your Engineering Managers when they are project troubleshooting, leading with strategic application of technical skills.
• Facilitate a culture of cost-effective continuous improvement and lead initiatives to optimise efficiency and accelerate project execution.
• Encourage and engage in collaboration and the sharing of knowledge and software components with other WTW development centres, take part in numerous cross collaborative innovative projects both locally and globally.
• Conduct PoC's using the latest technologies and present the findings to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Liaise with development teams to ensure the smooth delivery of solutions.

The essential skills/experience for this position are:

• Experience as a system architect:
  • Defining architecture strategies, roadmaps and backlogs
  • Designing and delivering high-performance and scalable data-driven on-premise, web and SaaS applications from a development, deployment and maintenance perspective
  • Evolving existing on-premise or desktop solutions towards next-generation technologies and architectures
  • Overseeing technical implementations undertaken by multiple scrum teams, comfortable being hands-on and close to the code as required.
  • Experience with SaaS/Cloud architecture
  • Experience using TOGAF or similar architecture frameworks and methodologies
  • Experience in architecting enterprise solutions in Azure
  • Highly experienced with Cloud and SaaS technologies
• Ability to work as part of a strategic leadership team, being a voice for technology activities and prioritisation in a mixed commercial, product and engineering leadership team, including experience contributing to a technology roadmap.
• Experience fostering and contributing to cross team collaboration across both technology and product disciplines, with focus on sharing of technology capability across teams, internal open source, and systems rationalisation and component sharing.
• Practical experience with the full software development lifecycle in a commercial/production environment: requirements capture and analysis, estimation, architecture and design, implementation, unit and system-level testing, installation and deployment, maintenance.
• Understanding of tools and principles related to continuous integration and deployment, DevOps, version control, build and test infrastructure, pipelines, infrastructure as code, defect and backlog management etc.
• Excellent practical appreciation and understanding of software engineering principles and design characteristics enabling the implementation of software, which is highly performant, scalable, easily maintainable, extensible and easy to test and debug.
• Solid appreciation of
  • Infrastructure technologies and topologies, templating and deployment
  • Infosec requirements and best practices NIST, CIS, understanding of authentication and authorisation patterns, IAM platforms and standards)
  • SaaS-related operational requirements (e.g. SLA's, DR, monitoring, 1st- 3rd line support).
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, ability to adjust interaction and messaging to different levels across different disciplines (engineering, product, actuarial).
• Appreciation of current and emerging technologies along with their potential benefits and limitations
• Understanding the connectivity between systems and integration opportunities.
• Familiarity and experience with data analytics and data management techniques, platforms and standards.
• Familiarity working within a regulated business landscape within financial services.
• Familiarity with integration techniques, including RESTful APIs, Open API Specification and GraphQL.
• F amiliarity and experience with data analytics and data management techniques, platforms and standards.
• Familiarity working within a regulated business landscape within financial services.
• Familiarity with integration techniques including the RESTful APIs, Open API Specification and GraphQL.

(ICT_TECH TD_2024_84R)