Solution Architect Ii

**Purpose of the Job**:
Become part of an innovative, forward-thinking and strategic IT architecture team.

Our mature architecture team is based in Brackenfell (strategically placed close to the sea and the Cape winelands) and includes experts in enterprise architecture, solution architecture and data architecture. We operate in an agile retail environment of Africa’s largest retailer that utilizes industry leading IT technologies which run on-premise and in multiple cloud platforms.

**Job Objectives**:
**Define and continuously improve the customer data and analytics architecture framework and solution architecture modeling and standards.**
- Develop and maintain an understanding of the business strategy and changes to business priorities.
- Define a structured customer data and analytics architecture approach and methodology for capturing the key views of the enterprise.
- Architect the next-generation customer data and analytics framework developed on a group of core technologies.
- Align to the enterprise data reference architecture in support of the enterprise and regulatory information governance needs such as Information Security, Enterprise Information Management, POPI, PCI, etc.
- Identify, define and communicate standards, guidelines, formats, meta-models, policies, best practices, and governance practices for customer data and analytics architectures and designs.
- Ensure that the customer data and analytics approach integrates into the methodologies and processes of the rest of the Enterprise Architecture team.
- Stay abreast of best practices and / or new developments in customer data and analytics and related disciplines and drive adoption as deemed appropriate.
- Analyze business requirements and create related customer data and analytics architectures and designs for the baseline (“as is”) and target (“to be”) solution architectures.
- Define customer data and analytics architecture governance processes and quality compliance criteria.
- Perform quality assurance checks on customer data and analytics Architectures and Designs and enforce quality compliance criteria to set policies and standards.
- Perform quality checks on existing customer data and analytics Architectures and Designs to identify potential business risks areas and make re-engineering recommendations.
- Ensure customer data and analytics security conforms to Information Security Governance policies and standards.

**Provide expert customer data and analytics guidance, ensure solution architectures and designs are in line with the customer data technology standards and conduct architecture and design reviews as part of the Architecture Review Committee.**
- Be clearly identified as the customer data and analytics technical lead and provide technical guidance and leadership in proposals, RFIs, RFPs, and BI project teams.
- Provide architectural oversight and guidance to development teams to ensure high-quality technical solution designs during the detailed design, build, test and deploy phases that conforms to architecture principles and standards.
- Mentor senior developers / designers / business analysts to become Solution Architects.
- Define and develop the overall customer data and analytics architecture landscape in partnership with the Domain Architect, Data Analytics team and other Solution Architects.
- Review proposed solution architectures ensuring alignment with architecture principles, the architecture framework, cloud reference architectures, set technology standards and identify critical gaps, and recommend improvements.
- Give guidance and advice to peers in respect to customer data and analytics solution designs ensuring the designs conform to industry best practices and standards

**Qualifications**:
Degree in Information Systems / B Sc Computer Science (or similar)

**Experience**:
7- 10 years Working experience within the IT industry.

5 - 10 years Working experience in data warehousing with at least 5 project lifecycles

5 years Retail industry experience with an understanding of retail business processes.

5 years Proven experience with customer big data and data science / data analytics in a cloud environment (AWS/Azure/Google) as well as on-premise

5 years Experience with Campaign Management, Data Management Platforms, Demand Side Platforms, and Customer Data Platforms.

3 years Working experience with different ETL integration technologies (SSIS, Talend, SAP Data Services, etc.) - desirable

3 years Working experience with data modelling tools - desirable

5+ years Experience with all aspects of IT projects from business analysis, architectures, system analysis and design through development, testing, implementation, and production support (SDLC).

5+ years Excellent design and architecture skills and proven track record delivering well designed complex enterprise class systems.

3+ years Excellent technical development and be able to mentor others to improve their design and development sk