Principal Network as a Service (Global Fabric) Tribe Architect

Why this job matters

The Global Fabric Tribe Architect is the role that is shaping the technical direction for the new collection of network-as-a-service product offerings for Business.
The Tribe Architect is a critical join between delivery and architecture. 
This role matters because it is the technical leadership of every tribe, it is the thinker that makes sure we have the right roadmap that joins the technical strategy with the business outcomes for the tribe.
It is key as it’s moving the architecture decision making closer to then work, speeding up and simplifying making sure the architecture is being rolled out.
The TA maintains the decisions and backlog of technical debt too, for decisions made to not build strategically the TA will be accountable for those decisions balancing the business outcomes vs goal of building the strategic and ensuring we don’t have to build tactically because we didn’t have the right roadmap.

What I’ll be doing – your accountabilities

1.    End-to-end Architecture Strategy/Roadmap and Design of the Tribe product/ solutions
•    Sets and drives the architecture strategy/roadmap aligned to the Tribe’s vision. Drives adoption of the strategic architecture, balancing the outcomes needed of the tribes (including transition states)
•    Recommends to the Tribe Lead the expected outcomes balancing customer value and technical debt (including relevant technology KPI targets)
•    Guides on the technical shaping and feasibility estimates for epics and features, identifying major dependencies.
•    Inputs tribe roadmap content into overall Business architecture roadmap and strategy
2.    Responsible for consistent Business Architecture that aligns pan BT. Owns the business capabilities for their tribe, the maturity and roadmap of capabilities, along with matrix of capabilities consumed from other Tribes. Owns the relationship with the sub-domain to ensure capability evolves in line with the architecture.
3.    Responsible for bringing together other subdomains from others CFUs that use the same capabilities that the tribe needs
4.    Architecture Demand – understands the domain architecture relevant to Tribe products development and collaborates with Sub-Domain Architects to ensure the sub-domain strategic architecture runway aligns with business needs and timescales
5.    Drive Tribe engineering excellence, quality assurance and technical debt optimization and backlog of tech debt the tribe has built.
6.    Tribe product/solution architecture meets the nonfunctional requirements:
•    Performance - Ensure the continued uptime/reliability, integrity, performance and maintenance of the Tribe’s experience layer.
•    Security – Ensures security by design and security compliance with all work in the tribe
•    Economics – Optimizes the TCO of the tribe architecture, ensuring the affordability of the IT with the sub-domain architect
•    Modernisation – Ensure the tribe is following Cloud native guardrails and modernizing the relevant tribe components. 
7.    Re-usable patterns and Low-Level Designs - Leads the creation of innovative and repeatable solution architectures to resolve the most complex solution architecture problems and meet agreed requirements, reusable patterns catalogued and aligned to business capabilities the tribe offers.
8.    Stakeholder engagement - Support the tribe lead with stakeholder engagement to develop and gain support for proposed solutions, providing technology expertise and identifying efficiencies within deployed Technology. 
9.    Tribe Resource Planning - Recommends to the Tribe Lead the composition and volume of technology resources and capabilities needed across squads to deliver outcomes, but not responsible for managing the resource allocation of squad architects.
10.    SME - Operates as an SME within own field of expertise and acts as expert advisor to other teams and senior management on the most complex architecture related issues.
11.    Customer Centric – Promotes and adopts empathy driven design for customer centric products.
12.    Inputs into the MTP process to ensure the relevant funding needed to advance the architecture is requested and identify where lack of funding is slowing the overall architecture rollout down.

Skills required for the job

•    Experience of various fixed line network technology and journeys in a business context – scalability of large corporate deals, through to SoHo journeys.
•    Vision setting ability to set direction for how Global Fabric systems architecture should evolve.
•    Ability to direct and guide a team of architects and engineers in the tribe and squads.
•    Drive End to end roadmap / architecture runway for the tribe over a 6/12/18 month horizon, considering business transformation, benefits, cost and technical maturity.
•    Ability to create and maintain the business capabilities for the domain, in line with the pan BT capability framework.
•    Ability to balance and manage own time with multiple priorities from tribe demand through to team roadmap alignment.
•    Create, maintain and govern re-usable patterns for the role in a way that can be shared and understood by solution architects and engineers.
•    Ability to make difficult decisions with or without data on strategic vs tactical investment choices to further the business and strategic outcomes.
•    Ability to take people on a journey in an inspirational way with simple clear communications, ranging from junior engineers up to CFU MD/CEO level presentations.
•    Use of Jira and other tools needed for Agile planning (Mural, MS Whiteboard etc)
•    Ability and experience of driving Agile ways of working and execution at pace.
•    Ability to define shorter-term/tactical work that can be carried out within strategic vision. 
•    Using outcome-based delivery and creative thinking to achieve results. 
•    Excellent communication skills to bring multiple squads together – blending the work architects do in tribes with the work they do in Architecture.

Experience you would be expected to have

•    Mandatory: 5 years+ experience in a senior architecture role.
•    Mandatory: Very strong stakeholder management experience from junior developer through to CEO.
•    Mandatory: Experience creating roadmaps for a “domain” that can tell both the technical, commercial and business impacts. 
•    Preferred: Experience of Agile planning, SAFE framework
•    Preferred: TOGAF certified