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Job title: Principal Architect
Level: Principal
Reports to: CTO
Main purpose of role & level in the business:
Provides strong technical leadership within Kainos and advocates the effective use of technology to solve complex and varied business problems. Actively evangelises Kainos’ technical ability and solutions internally and externally. Drives the future growth of Kainos by identifying innovative technical solutions to business problems and by developing the Kainos technical capability. Leads clients and delivery teams to create solution strategies from scratch. Drives innovation personally and through Solution Architects, ensuring that Kainos’ and client’s capabilities are significantly improved. Devises and costs large solutions from scratch, managing risk and appreciating commercial and environmental factors. Responsible for defining and governing technical direction and strategy both within Kainos and throughout project teams. Maintains an industry-leading knowledge of technology, disseminates this knowledge at all levels, and seeks opportunities to deploy new technologies to the benefit of Kainos and its customers. Responsible for establishing and enforcing discipline and quality, achieving targeted programme and project profitability and appropriately reporting all project variables.
Minimum (essential) requirements:
- An exemplary and inspiring technology leader, able to deliver using a variety of methodologies, particularly Agile.
- Able to drive large-scale Agile transformation in organisations.
- Able to shape large-scale technical direction while appreciating detail and inspiring the people who deliver projects.
- Able to produce and review estimates, ensuring that they represent a deliverable and commercially-viable solution.
- Experience of technically leading programmes of work, making all the significant decisions that affect technology choices and solution strategy.
- Capable of providing technical thought leadership and guidance to clients.
- Leads standard-setting and architecture. Ensures successful evolution and adherence to these within project.
- Able to devise and cost viable, winning solutions for sales proposals, including excellent negotiation and selling skills.
- A thought leader, who is able to provide valuable advice and guidance to clients and to manage relationships with clients and 3rd party suppliers.
- Excellent understanding of solutions deployment and operation as well as functionality.
- Excellent communicator, able to explain, persuade and justify decisions and concepts to people at all levels.
- Continuously improves Kainos’ and clients’ productivity using software development tools, design methodologies and best practice.
- Excellence in three or more architectures and/or technologies having successfully applied them in a commercial environment.
- Breadth of knowledge across the Kainos areas of operation.
- Competent in security, performance tuning, capacity planning, resilience and availability across heterogeneous architectures.
- Ability to motivate and inspire senior technical staff. Proven ability to attract and retain the best people.
- Ability to work to tight deadlines.
- Ability to balance project demands with those of the wider organisation.
- Strong ability to make sensible decisions under pressure taking a balanced view of technical and commercial demands.
- Well-known in the industry; participates in community activity, for example, speaking at conferences or contributing to open source projects.
- Broad business & technology experience and a thorough awareness of evolving technology trends and their potential impact on current & future business applications.
- Confident dealing with C-level executives and industry-leading architects and consultants
- Complies, and ensures team members comply, with all confidentiality and non-disclosure policies and/or agreements and ensures security of information at all times.
Desirable:
- Strong skills in the latest technologies.
- Able to act as an excellent programmer, performing reviews of critical code and assisting with evolution of architecture.
- Has spent significant time working away from home base and/or on a client site.
- Able to confidently deal with the media.
Personal attributes:
- Constructive, professional, credible and can communicate effectively with clients and colleagues.
- Excellent at managing personal time and priorities.
- Politically astute, with excellent interpersonal and negotiating skills.
- Creative, articulate, enthusiastic, responsible, logical, and thorough.
- A good team player capable of delivering results in less than perfect circumstances.
- Pragmatic, tolerant of ambiguity, able to find a way through difficult situations when others cannot.
- Capable of working at an abstract level.
- Mature, non-confrontational style.
- Quality focused.
- An effective mentor and teacher.
- Highly flexible (including willingness to work away from home base).
- Visionary and entrepreneurial, with a positive "can do" attitude towards addressing the technical challenges facing Kainos and clients.
About us
Kainos is a high-growth IT services company providing digital technology solutions and agile software development to enterprise customers. Across our 30-year history, we have worked on transformational projects across government, NHS and a myriad of private sector clients
WHO YOU ARE:
Our vision is to enable outstanding people to create digital solutions that have a positive impact on people’s lives. Our values aren't abstract; they are the behaviours we expect from each other every day and underpin everything that we do. We expect everyone to display our values by being determined in how obstacles are overcome; honest when dealing with others; respectful of how you treat others; creative to find solutions to complex problems and cooperative by sharing information, knowledge and experience. These values, applied collectively, help to produce an outstanding Kainos person, team and culture.
We're an inclusive bunch at Kainos and we believe in equal opportunity. We welcome applications from all walks of life, including those with criminal records. Everyone who is offered a position here undergoes a basic background check , however no one is treated differently due to their background where it isn't relevant to the role. It's important to note - failure to reveal information which is relevant to the position sought, could result in us having to withdraw the conditional offer of employment.
In short: Having a criminal record will not exclude you from a career with Kainos. This depends entirely on the nature and requirements of the position, together with the circumstances and background of offences. Kainos has a policy on the recruitment of ex-offenders (available on request).
