Principal Solution Architect

Principal Solutions Architect (Customer Domain)

Location: Remote

About the Role:
A Solution Architect with experience in eCommerce, especially in the areas of Website, APIs, microservices and eProcurement.

To join the Solution Architecture team designing our global website, global API Platform, eProcurement and customer systems (CRM, Order Management, Customer Data, Pricing, Product).

Working with Enterprise Architecture, a large Engineering team, Product Owners and Product Managers.

Key Deliverables for my role

Role

Ensure our digital products, platforms and services are built to meet and exceed customers’ expectations.
Deliver target architectures, high-level designs and technology roadmaps across the website, API Platform, eProcurement, and customer systems.
Work with existing agile teams, and other solution architects, to provide designs, estimates and governance in the rollout of our global website and API Platform.
Provide technical leadership and bring the big picture to the engineering teams, and ensure they understand and build towards it.

Deliverables

Develop the architecture & overall design for major/strategic projects in line with the output of the Enterprise Architects and provide the boundaries within which the engineering teams can subsequently deliver.
Define and present options, recommendations and estimates based on the strategy and investigation by the teams.

Produce High-level Architecture Design documentation, covering:
Target Architecture
Non-Functional Requirements
Security
Support
Implementation and Roll-out

Define target and transitional architectures.
Define best practice in terms of patterns, standards and principles.
Participation in cross-functional Design Working Groups and Design Authorities to discuss, agree and communicate key design elements.
Create Key Decision documents to allow wider technology and business stakeholders to make the decisions that teams and projects need.
Communicate the reasoning and implications of key architectural decisions to senior management stakeholders.

Ensure that the programmes, projects and initiatives are aware of, and comply with, the documented Architectural governance processes.
Provide mentoring and coaching for less experienced members of the Solution Architecture team.

Useful Experience

Relevant areas of experience for this role

Architecture Skills:
Scalable architectural patterns (SOA, microservices, API management, event driven)
Security and robustness (Identity and access control, scalability, usability, maintainability, monitoring, alerting)
General architectural design (methodologies, diagrams, analysis, specifications)

Business Areas:
eCommerce
eProcurement
Web and mobile solutions
Marketing (Adobe, Google, etc.)
Service Domains: Customer, Product, Pricing, Stock, Orders, Payments
Data Modelling
Supply Chain

Technical Knowledge:
AWS (Lambda, Dynamo, RDS), Azure, Google Cloud
CDNs
Gateways (Kong, Apollo, AWS API Gateway)
GraphQL - including Federated Data Graph
Single-page Applications
Containerisation (Docker, Nomad)
Authentication (Auth0 - both user and service authentication)
Development (Typescript, Node, React, Java)
Integration (IBM CloudPak, ESB, EAI, iPaaS)
Infrastructure (Data centres, networks, cloud connectivity, SaaS, PaaS)
Data Tools (Snowflake, Cloudera)

Systems:
CRM (SAP, Salesforce)
Customer Master systems
Customer Data Platforms
ERP (SAP)
Product (Riversand)
Pricing (Pricefx)
Search (GroupBy, Endeca)
Content Management systems (Contentful, Wordpress)

Soft skills:
Presentation (PowerPoint, Miro, Teams - to large and senior audiences)
Communication (business and technical audiences)
Negotiating / Influencing (suppliers, business teams, engineering teams)
Teamwork (across multiple teams and disciplines)
Decision Making
DevOps and Agile
Confluence, JIRA, Teams, Slack

About RS Group:
RS Group is a global omni-channel solutions partner for industrial customers and suppliers. Our business has operations in three geographical regions - the Americas, EMEA and APAC, supported by global organisations for supply chain, corporate functions, marketing, and product & supplier management. Our market today is large, fragmented, local in nature and digitally immature. Only a few international distributors serve it, with many regional and local providers, who largely trade offline. Currently we estimate the global market value to be c.£400bn, with our global market share