Enterprise Architect

Working hours: 35 hours per week, Monday to Friday

Duration: 6 month contract (outside IR35)

Location: Gloucester

Benefact Group are looking for a Contract Enterprise Architect to join our Gloucester head office on a 6 month contract.

We are in the early days of having formed a Group Technology function and require a contract Architect with proven experience to work with our leadership team to help setup and define the practice. We are on a transformation journey to migrate away from more traditional monolithic Insurance platforms and on-premises solutions to a cloud based eco-system approach and so it's a great opportunity to join at a pivotal time where you can have a real impact.

• Setting and maintaining the Benefact Group enterprise architecture approach and strategy, creating innovative and actionable plans, guiding and contributing to current projects and programmes to measure effectiveness of programs and return of investment goals
• Accountable for specifying architectural standards and patterns that assist in developing a secure, scalable governance and operating model including the creation of a Group Architecture Review Board (ARB)
• Selecting technologies within a layered domain architecture to meet information technology and business requirements.
• Working with the internal project teams to map out Insurance Eco-system event driven architecture plans in multiple phase.
• Design standards, frameworks, and processes to support and facilitate projects across the Group and for individual business units or regions
• Map out and maintain enterprise architecture views for different regional business units, feeding into the overall technology strategy
• Creating the high-level architecture strategy and guide implementation teams on the choice of components, standards and patterns to use in the design and implementation phases, building out libraries of reusable elements and capabilities
• Leading a small team of various architectural disciplines ensuring they follow Architecture principles and recommended practices through fit-for-purpose governance

• Proven experience in Enterprise Architecture role coupled with extensive senior stakeholder engagement experience and business administration and commercial/financial awareness and proven approaches to requirements soliciting and requirements prioritising in line with business strategic objectives
• Experience integrating with Cloud/SaaS applications, APIs and legacy applications with a strong understanding on how integration has evolved towards being a digital, cloud and API-driven capability
• Experience with the evaluation and selection of new technologies based on the supplied requirements including managing proof of concepts or ‘spikes’ to validate if a considered technology is capable of delivering against the requirements.
• Experience mapping applications and business systems using Gartner TIME analysis methodology would be advantageous
• Insurance or Financial Services experience or exposure would be very beneficial but not essential
• Good communication skills, including the ability to communicate to both technical and business stakeholders in plain language
• Team management, coaching and mentoring and leveraging teams’ competencies/capabilities across the architecture function
• Qualified to degree level or possessing the relevant professional experience and working knowledge of core enterprise architecture domains with particular focus on cloud-based architectures
• Previous knowledge/experience of working with Agile delivery methodologies and a Scrum framework
• Experience with agile project management and collaboration tools (e.g. JIRA, Confluence, Miro)

Benefact Group is a unique international financial services Group made up of over 30 businesses. We are owned by a charity and are currently the UK’s 3rd largest corporate donor, having given away £200 million since 2016. We have ambitious plans to become the UK’s number one corporate donor, with strategic objectives in place to double the Group’s size.

We believe it’s essential to attract, empower, grow and reward talented people, offering fantastic opportunities for career and personal development. Our giving ethos, 135-year history and the diversity of what we do, has enabled us to build a culture of kindness, great ambition, and of passionate people driven to do better and be better.  

At Benefact Group, we are committed to creating aninclusive culture and building an environment where each and every one of usfeels valued and respected. We are a community made up of people with arange of different backgrounds, abilities, perspectives, beliefs and interestsand we value the strength this brings to us as a Group. We welcome applicationsfrom everyone.

If you need any additional support during therecruitment process, then please let us know.