Head of Engineering, Technology Architecture & Operations

Job Description

We're seeking a Head of Engineering, Technology Architecture, and Operations to lead our Central Engineering group consisting of Solution Architecture, Cloud Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, Backend Engineering, Technology Service & Program Management, Quality Engineering and SDET.

This role will drive change by collaborating closely with Line-of-Business Technology (LOBT) teams, including LOBT heads, business stakeholders, business analysts, application teams, infrastructure specialists and architects. They also champion innovation by utilizing emerging technologies to achieve market differentiation, establishing partnerships, exploring, and conducting proof-of-concept (POC) projects for new technologies.

Key Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with LOB to understand business goals, functions, applications, and technology landscapes. Develop architecture roadmaps, technology capabilities, and implementation plans.
• Provide technical vision, strategy, and lead the long-term architectural direction, focusing on reusable platforms/product components. Analyze and advise senior leadership on product architecture and adoption standards.
• Deeply understand the business and work with stakeholders to gather business and functional requirements, translating them into robust, scalable, and supportable technical specifications and architectures.
• Own end-to-end architecture, including detailed designs of systems and applications aligned with country and regional strategies. Lead the creation of design specifications for application development and modification. Define integration patterns.
• Map business requirements to solution components using best practices, establishing standards and processes. Understand and map application and infrastructure interdependencies. Think across technologies and define usage patterns.
• Create a roadmap for modernizing applications, utilizing modular, loosely coupled designs deployable on cloud-native architectures. Assist application teams in their modernization efforts.
• Develop and document design principles, service catalogs, and patterns as enterprise and solution architecture standards. Drive design consistency, reduce duplication, and enforce architecture models. Document processes and best practices. Promote standards, reusable components, code, and APIs.
• Identify and assess design options and trade-offs to address functional and non-functional requirements. Recommend designs considering current and target state architectures. Develop architecture specifications for engineering and execution.
• Ensure adoption and implementation of defined solutions. Provide technical expertise for systems architecture design and iteration. Collaborate with engineering teams on system integration standards.
• Lead governance forums for architecture alignment. Ensure regular reviews of architecture standards and patterns in response to evolving business and technology landscapes, with thorough vetting processes.
• Balance collaborative capabilities like design and engineering with strong governance on security, availability, and performance.
• Foster a culture of product innovation and excellence, characterized by collaboration, execution focus, customer-centricity, and purpose-driven outcomes.

Qualifications:

• Experience: 15+ years of progressive experience in technology leadership, including significant experience managing large engineering organizations.
• Technical Expertise:
• Deep understanding of modern software development practices, cloud-native architectures, and DevOps methodologies.
• Technical proficiency: Excellent understanding of technical architecture and contemporary application design patterns, such as microservices and serverless functions.
• Comprehensive architectural knowledge: Solid grasp of End-to-End Architecture, encompassing Backend (Java), Front-End technologies, mobile applications (Android and iOS), Databases (SQL & NoSQL), Data Lake, RESTful APIs, and streaming technology.
• Enterprise integration expertise: Deep understanding of Enterprise Integration and Messaging Patterns, along with SOA Governance practices.
• Cloud-native experience: Proven ability to work in a cloud-native environment, including public cloud, containers, serverless, cloud data, credential and security management (keys, secrets, vaults, etc.), and service monitoring on cloud, PaaS, and container environments (AWS, GCP, Docker, ECS, Kubernetes, Infra-as-code, etc.).
• Programming skills: Basic proficiency in at least one major programming language (Java, Golang, Python, etc).
• Web development and database knowledge: Good understanding of web development standards and database technologies (Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, BigQuery).
• DevOps and Agile familiarity: Good grasp of DevOps, SRE, and Agile methodologies and tools (Maven, Gradle, Github Actions, Cucumber).
• Architecture frameworks: Familiarity with one or more Architecture Frameworks.
• Leadership Skills:
• Proven ability to inspire and motivate teams, build consensus, and drive change.
• Problem-solving: Exceptional problem analysis skills and a self-driven approach to discovering, defining, developing, and delivering data-driven solutions.
• Hands-on approach: Willingness to be hands-on while maintaining strong attention to both framework and detail.
• Independence and initiative: Ability to work independently and manage multiple concurrent initiatives.
• Strategic Thinking:
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to develop and execute long-term technology strategies.
• Strategic alignment: Proven capability to grasp business strategies and processes, and translate them effectively into technological solutions.
• Communication Skills:
• Collaborative spirit: A strong collaborator capable of working effectively within guilds and tribes. Collaboration and teamwork are crucial for success in this role.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to effectively interact with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Communication and engagement: Excellent communication skills and ability to manage engagement through sharing strategic plans, providing execution updates, leading projects, and delivering status updates.
• Stakeholder management: Ability to bridge the gap between stakeholders across Lines of Businesses, from C-level executives to Application Developers. Effective communication of technical concepts in clear and established terms, using appropriate channels and collaboration methods (both offline and online)