Job Description
Role Description
The Solutions Architect is responsible for consulting with clients and ensuring high quality designs that are practical, deliverable and maintain the integrity of FNZ’s products and services that help clients meet their business objectives
Specific Role Responsibilities
Main Tasks:
Contribute towards business requirements and ensure the underlying business problem is understood throughout FNZ
Production of technical and/or functional designs that fulfil the requirements, are commercially viable and technically achievable
Participation throughout the software development lifecycle to ensure the project stays true to the design vision and the client’s needs, and that the design is responsive to the challenges encountered during build
Maintain the functional integrity of the primary areas of their delivery team
Act as subject matter expert for nominated areas of their delivery team.
Responsibilities:
Requirements Engineering
The Solutions Architect will gather, review, validate and provide feedback on requirements for solutions and products, to ensure that the requirement:
Fully and coherently expresses the underlying business need for change
Includes a full consideration of non-functional requirements
May reasonably be answered by a development that will be consistent both with existing technical architecture and also the product roadmap (the latter in consultation with representatives of the Product team).
Design
On allocated projects, the Solutions Architect will be the overall solutions architect and be responsible for the design. On other projects, the Solutions Architect may support other members of the delivery team.
The Solutions Architect will be responsible for the production and documentation of designs.
Designs must:
Meet all the agreed functional and technical requirements
Take account of and meet the agreed non-functional requirements
Be documented fully according to FNZ standards for design documentation
Utilise the technology framework in which products are built
Be clearly and easily traceable to the requirements
Deliver usable functionality e.g. intuitive, transparent, easy to test, maintainable, recoverable
Be consistent with the functional and data architectures of all of FNZ’s products
Correctly utilise existing software components and as necessary refactor such components to generalise their function.
Review and provide constructive feedback and help to ensure the high quality of designs done by others within the delivery teams
Contribute to wider FNZ design meetings, including sharing best practices, sharing architectural decisions and gathering feedback on proposed designs, and providing constructive feedback to designs from others.
Use best practice principles of good software architecture.
Project build and delivery participation
The Solution Architect will remain a participant in all software projects for which they act as designer, throughout the build, delivery, implementation and support phases of that project. In this capacity the Solution Architect will:
Provide a handover of the design to the delivery team via. Design Walkthroughs and help lead estimation sessions
Provide client walkthroughs and demos
Be available to both the delivery team and external stakeholders such as the regression testing team, releases, documentation, implementation, consultancy and support to answer questions about the design
Ensure that the design is built correctly
Amend the design if problems emerge during the build and test phases.
Participate in development and test activities on a project where extra capacity is required.
Product Owner Responsibilities
The Solution Architect will also:
Ensure that changes within their stream support the product vision and strategy
Support and assist the sales and marketing team throughout the sales process, including software demonstrations
Participate in product webinars
Develop other people’s expertise in primary areas of responsibilities
Assist Delivery and Project Managers in putting project plans together
Raise any issues encountered promptly with key stakeholders
Fulfil the Product Owner role on Scrum projects.
Other Duties
The Solution Architect may also be required to:
Document existing designs within an FNZ product where full such documentation does not already exist
Act as a consultant in areas of expertise, both internally and externally to clients
Devise and deliver training courses in areas of expertise
Assist the production support team in the triage of client support issues in the their teams functional areas
Help mentor more junior members of the team.
Essential Requirements
Significant relevant prior development experience ideally in RPG and Java (5+ years)
Customer facing experience
Significant experience with Figaro (5+ years) in either a development or a consultancy environment
Significant knowledge of the financial industry
Experience of mentoring more junior members of a team
Confident, and able to take initiative given client and delivery focused environment
Commercially aware
Excellent organisational, administration and time management skills
Good team communication skills, confident in dealing with internal and external clients
Highly developed written and oral communication skills
Superior analytical thinking and problem solving.
About FNZ
FNZ is committed to opening up wealth so that everyone, everywhere can invest in their future on their terms. We know the foundation to do that already exists in the wealth management industry, but complexity holds firms back.
We created wealth’s growth platform to help. We provide a global, end-to-end wealth management platform that integrates modern technology with business and investment operations. All in a regulated financial institution.
We partner with the world’s leading financial institutions, with over US$2.4 trillion in assets on platform (AoP).
Together with our clients, we empower nearly 30 million people across all wealth segments to invest in their future.