The Ideal Candidate

You’re a senior engineer or architect with deep experience with architectural patterns and solution designs, preferably in cloud-native SaaS, regulated financial services or information security sectors. You can work independently to understand a new industry and its associated standards, products and technologies, and then capture and share the distilled knowledge. You can define standards and principles for how Entersekt should design its products to achieve our future vision. You communicate clearly, and you naturally collaborate to find the right solution. You enjoy learning about new technologies and architectures, solving real business problems and building prototypes and POCs. You can hold your own with senior software engineers and take their input, while also helping them build and design in a more re-usable way. Your work should be clear and understandable to business stakeholders, technical stakeholders, and external customers/partners.

The Role

This position will form part of the Entersekt Architecture function, which reports to the CTO. Your role will be to help identify areas where Entersekt can innovate to win and eliminate areas where we cannot establish a competitive edge. This will involve understanding the financial services industry, the current solutions in the market, and emerging trends. You will explore new technologies and associated architectures and understand how different industry solutions work. You’ll recommend architectural and design approaches to how Entersekt should integrate with these products and industries and identify areas where we can add value or compete. You will also support and enable our engineering teams to get value from our existing product architecture and adjust it where it’s not optimal. In this role you’ll collaborate with other internal and external stakeholders such as business development, product, engineering and solutions teams, our customers, current and potential partners and other industry stakeholders.

Responsibilities

Technical Architecture

• Integrate knowledge of the overarching business strategy when exploring programs and projects within the CTO division.
• Advise on the technical direction and help drive initiatives within the CTO function that could stretch across multiple divisions.
• Where required, explore new concepts and techniques and execute on the research and development of initiatives within the CTO function.
• Design and define principles for our Product Architecture.
• Define technical specifications and algorithms where needed.
• Analyse industry trends and produce reports and recommendations.
• Monitor and assess current architectural adoption across the business and help define strategies to synthesize and integrate them.
• Provide technical leadership, make recommendations and collaborate with Product Development to ensure the technical architecture direction is well understood and can be executed on.

Innovation

• Identify innovation opportunities by detecting inefficiencies or change drivers inside the financial services industry.
• Design the high-level structure of new technology solutions. This also includes identifying potential roadblocks.
• Solve unique and ambiguous problems with broad impact; typically oversee standards, controls and operating methods that have a strategic impact on the business.
• Provide and co-create innovation and exploration ideas; help manage and prioritize these; define approaches to validate/qualify these concepts.
• Engage with new third-party providers and partners to understand their offering; define potential combined use cases or opportunities to explore together.

Industry & Partners

• Anticipate emerging technology and architectural trends and regulatory/risk issues as a basis for recommending large-scale product, technical, functional or operational improvements.
• Keep up to date with industry standards, trends and analyst positioning.
• Participate in relevant industry forums and help move Entersekt’s position forward.
• Provide industry updates and interpretations to the rest of the organisation.
• Review industry material, distill key areas of exploration and craft a plan of action.

Skills and Experience

Successful candidates for this role will generally possess the following qualifications and skills:

• 10+ years’ experience in a technology/software environment.
• Engineering, Computer Science, or relevant degree or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience in defining, documenting and communicating architectural designs and principles for software products and solution proposals.
• Ability to build a ‘story’ to explain concepts and positions to various types of stakeholders including commercial, business and technical stakeholders.
• Experience with one or more of the following is preferred: financial services, mobile platforms, consumer-facing solutions and/or payment/EFT systems.
• Experience with cloud-native SaaS architectures, design, delivery, and operations (e.g. microservices, containers/Kubernetes, CI/CD, multi-tenant considerations), is preferred.
• Preferably a good working understanding of and practical experience with Amazon Web Services.
• Preferably experience in building scalable and data rich services on microservice architecture.
• Systems engineering and/or requirements elicitation exposure will be an advantage.

Personality Attributes

• Dedicated and self-motivated.
• Creative problem-solver.
• Energised by change and new possibilities.
• Strong presentation and facilitation skills; ability to host workshops and design sessions.
• Effective communication skills (verbal and written): the ability to articulate the key differentiators of a solution and engage in technical discussions with customers and partners.
• Sound judgement: knowing what will work.
• Balances deep technical engagement with a clear view of business outcomes and constraints.