Principal Architect

Why this job matters

This role is a critical join between delivery and architecture. 
It is the technical leader of every tribe. It is the thinker that makes sure we have the right architecture runway that joins our technical strategy to the business outcomes that the tribe are delivering. It moves architecture decision making closer to the work, speeding up and simplifying our ways of working. 
The Tribe Architect will play a role in shaping new work into our digital teams, and will make sure that where we choose to not build strategically we have assessed the trade-off of getting quicker business outcomes. 
This role is a key technical leader in our organisation, playing a part in leading our consumer architecture guild which is a place for all architects across our consumer business to come together to share best practice & career development. 

This is a hybrid role (3 days a week in the office) based out of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol, Leeds or Belfast.

What you’ll be doing

• Architecture Runway for the Tribe :
  • 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 runway content into overall Business architecture roadmap and strategy 
• Responsible for consistent architecture that aligns pan BT. Owns the consumer 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. Will bring together subdomains from other CFUs that use the same capabilities that the tribe needs. 
• Assist with the triage of new initiatives through the digital front door, ensuring work gets to the right teams. 
• Drive Tribe engineering excellence, quality assurance and technical debt optimization and backlog of tech debt the tribe has built. 
• Be a virtual leader for other consumer architects, including by taking a lead role in the consumer architecture guild. 
• Accountable for ensuring that the Tribe product/solution architecture delivered by others meets our 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.  
• 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. 
• 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.  
• 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. 
• 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. 
• 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

• Ability to direct and guide a team of architects and engineers in the tribe. 
• 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 
• Customer Centric – Promotes and adopts empathy driven design for customer centric products. 

Experience

• Mandatory: 5 years+ experience in a senior tech role. This may be architecture, engineering or technical product management. 
• 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, product methodologies. 
• Preferred: TOGAF certified 

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• 25 days annual leave (plus bank holidays)
• 15% on target bonus
• Company car cash allowance
• Life Assurance
• Pension scheme
• Private Medical cover 
• Direct share scheme
• 50% off EE mobile pay monthly or SIM only plans
• Exclusive colleague discounts on our latest and greatest BT broadband packages
• BT TV with TNT Sports and NOW Entertainment
• 50% discount for friends and family on EE SIM Only plans & airtime element off a Flex Pay plan

Our leadership standards

Looking in:
Leading inclusively and Safely
I inspire and build trust through self-awareness, honesty and integrity.
Owning outcomes
I take the right decisions that benefit the broader organisation.

Looking out:
Delivering for the customer
I execute brilliantly on clear priorities that add value to our customers and the wider business.
Commercially savvy
I demonstrate strong commercial focus, bringing an external perspective to decision-making.

Looking to the future:
Growth mindset
I experiment and identify opportunities for growth for both myself and the organisation.
Building for the future
I build diverse future-ready teams where all individuals can be at their best.