Solution Architect

The Royal Mail Technology team is passionate about delivering high-quality products and outstanding digital experiences to our customers. Cutting edge technology is fundamental and key in helping us achieve our objective to be recognised as the best delivery company in both the UK and across Europe.

Our award-winning Technology team is at the heart of delivering a transformational journey at Royal Mail. The traditional letters business is declining, but our recent performance and the growth in parcels demonstrates that there is an opportunity for Royal Mail that we can capture, but we need to move quickly. By joining Royal Mail you will be helping to implement meaningful change, pushing forward with our transformation to become a more agile and even more customer focused business, while delivering more innovation, products and services for our customers. You will be working for a brand that’s a household name and a critical part of the UK’s infrastructure. 

Job Purpose

•    Ensuring that the solutions being designed and developed provide a consensus-based solution that is scalable, adaptable and in synchronisation with changing business needs. 
•    Taking responsibility for outlining the solution architecture and governing its implementation through delivery.  
•    Ensure solution designs and implementations are aligned to the overall Royal Mail Architecture. 
•    Making efficient and effective use of technology; matching current and foreseeable requirements 
•    Review and govern designs from our partners and suppliers to ensure adherence to Royal Mail standards and best practices.

In this role you will:

•    Develop the project blueprint received from Transformation/Enterprise Architects into solution designs as business needs are clarified, escalating and agreeing deviation from blueprint.
•    Prepare the solution architecture design; ensuring adherence to requirements, design principles and target vision for the overall solution.
•    Develop technology specifications and leverage existing technologies to ensure new technology solutions are designed for optimal business use.
•    Apply architectural and engineering concepts to design solutions that meet business requirements, considering scalability, maintainability, security, reliability, flexibility, availability and manageability.
•    Ensure process, application, data and technology architecture are aligned.
•    Identify the technologies to employ, taking responsibility for the assurance and governance of supplier solutions.
•    Partner with Business Analysts to provide technical oversight to ensure IT solutions meet end user needs.
•    Collaborate with development teams, designing and building the solution in iterative sprint cycles.
•    Educate stakeholders in Agile adoption, showcasing the benefits of iterative software delivery.

Qualifications and experience required:

•    Demonstrable experience in Azure Cloud in planning, architecture, high level design and implementation of one or more of the following aspects of solution architecture: Services, Applications, Integration or Data.
•    Proven experience of defining and implementing complex systems architectures.
•    Knowledge and experience of enterprise wide systems architectures.
•    Experience in performing complex analysis, consulting and providing technical recommendation.
•    Practical experience of planning, designing and implementing applications and data in a complex distributed environment.
•    Practical experience of service, application, data and infrastructure architecture
•    Experience in systems delivery; analysis, design, implementation, testing and support.
•    Experience of working with collaboration tools such as Jira and Confluence.
•    Experience of transformation from Waterfall to Agile delivery methodologies.    
•    Good understanding of Azure DevOps tools and methods

Advantageous experience:

•    Cloud Technologies such as GCP.
•    Experience in Android, Mobile solutions and Web Apps.
•    Experience in Azure PaaS services, IoT capabilities.
•    Experience of migrating from On-premise to Cloud technologies.
•    Relevant industrial / sectors, such as; Postal (National/International), Distribution, Logistics, Warehouse Management, Retail, Machine Automation.
•    REST API, JSON, XML, XSD, SOAP, File Transfers (SFTP/FTPS).
•    Messaging, Eventing, High volume transactional processing systems.
•    Programming language experience such as Java, .Net
•    LowCode development or similar tools.
•    API and microservice architecture 
•    Basic understanding about Big Data and Analytics  
•    New Product or software evaluation skill  
 

TECH YOU’D NEVER EXPECT

We’re evolving, transforming and working together to innovate and provide a service our customers can trust and recommend. This is tech you’d never expect from Royal Mail pushing the boundaries and delivering a First-Class delivery service.

We are an inclusive employer with equality, diversity and fairness at the heart of our values and we’re proud to be recognised in The Times Top 50 Employers for Women 2021 for an 8th consecutive year. We welcome applications from individuals from diverse backgrounds and are committed to promoting fair participation and equality of opportunity for all our job applicants. 

We are happy to support flexible working and would welcome having a conversation with you about how we could support your needs.