Associate Solution Architect

Title : Associate Solution Architect

Role classification : Permanent

Location : Halifax/ Nova Scotia (Canada)

Work model : Hybrid

Compensation : $65k - $95k CAD (depending on individual skillsets and level of experience)

Reason for open role : Growth and team expansion within NA

About Us

At Davies, we get it... you are not just looking for a job, you are looking to build a life and a career. We believe in our people and realize that our success is a direct result of creating a learning atmosphere, leadership opportunities, and promoting from within. We believe that engaging in corporate social activities and working together as a team is a vital part of the Davies culture.

With a multinational global team, Davies Group is a specialist professional services and technology firm working in partnership with leading insurance, highly regulated, and global businesses. At Davies Group, we help clients to manage risk, operate core business processes, and to transform and grow. We deliver operations, consulting and technology solutions across the risk and insurance value chain, including excellence in claims, underwriting, distribution, regulation, customer experience, human capital, transformation, and change management.

** Please note this role doesn't offer visa sponsorship and requires the candidate to be residing in Halifax as the role is hybrid and based out of our Halifax office location.

We are grateful to all the candidates who have shown interest to our role, however due to high volume of applications only shortlisted candidates will be contacted for further interview.

Job Overview

The Associate Solutions Architect (ASA) proactively and holistically supports EA activities that guide the development and managing of a portfolio of solutions. Solutions include projects, systems (including applications, technologies, processes, and information), and shared infrastructure and application services.

The ASA understands the concepts of business goals, objectives and business outcomes, business capabilities, value streams, and business processes and their importance in solution architecture. The ASA provides analysis and conducts design tasks related to supporting the development of technology solutions to ensure that solutions meet business needs and align with architectural governance and standards. They help to create deliverables for managing the organization's portfolio of "to be" and "as is" solutions — including systems (applications, processes, information, and technology), shared infrastructure services, and shared application services and components to enable and drive targeted business outcomes.

This role is a full-time, hybrid position with some travel both domestically and internationally as needed.

Responsibilities and Duties

Scope of Activities

The Associate Solutions Architect will demonstrate competencies across four key dimensions:

Interpret Business Needs

• Support the process of translating business and technical requirements into an architectural blueprint to achieve business objectives and documents all solution architecture design and analysis work.
• Works closely with Sr. Architects, the product owners and product managers to support the creation of a robust architectural runway that can support future business requirements throughout the product lifecycle.
• Have the curiosity and ability to learn business drivers and business capabilities (future and current state) to help support corresponding enterprise solution designs and change requirements to drive the organization's targeted business outcomes.
• Example deliverables: requirements traceability document, business process/capability impact assessment, and business process diagrams.

Assess Technology

• Monitors the current-state solution portfolio to identify deficiencies through aging of the technologies used by the application, or misalignment with business requirements.
• Supports product managers in end-of-life product decisions to maintain, refresh or retire services, or systems, including applications, technologies, processes, and information.
• Starts to understand emerging technology trends and disruptions and their practical application to enable new and evolving business and operating models (stretch)
• Analyzes the technology industry, competitors, and market trends, and determines their potential implications for a given solution.
• Analyzes the business-IT environment to detect critical deficiencies, legacy, and technical debt, and recommends solutions for improvement.
• Facilitates the evaluation and selection of software product standards and services, as well as the design of standard and custom software configurations.
• Helps consult with application and infrastructure development projects and products to fit systems or infrastructure to architecture and identify when it is necessary to modify designs to accommodate the solutions architecture.

Apply Technology

• Participates in the evaluation, design, and analysis for the implementation of a solutions architecture across a group of specific business applications or technologies based on enterprise business strategy, business capabilities, value streams, business requirements and enterprise standards.
• Supports the architecture for a broader scope of projects or products, working closely with application architects that manage and design architecture for a single project or product or initiative (stretch).
• Supports the development of a roadmap for the evolution of the enterprise solution portfolio from current to future state, as defined by the solutions architecture (stretch).
• Acts as a supporting consultant on a broad range of technologies, platforms, and vendor offerings to drive targeted business outcomes.
• Creates drafts of architectural designs to guide and contextualize solution development across products, services, projects, and systems, including applications, technologies, processes, and information (stretch).
• Works closely with the program management office (PMO) or project management office to ensure the execution of plans corresponds with what is being promised throughout the project or product lifecycle.
• Provides consulting support to application architects within agile teams to ensure the project or product is aligned with the overall enterprise architecture.

Supports Enterprise Guidance

• Assists providing deliverables like standard definitions, reference models and architecture designs to support architectural governance to assess the impact of new and ongoing technology investment on the business and IT estate.
• Supports a community of practice (CoP), guiding and helping agile teams, product owners to align with the overall enterprise architecture governance and assurance.
• Example deliverables: solution scorecard, enterprise reference architecture components

Experience and Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, engineering, system analysis or a related study, or equivalent experience.
• One to three years of experience in IT solution development discipline.
• Exposure to multiple, diverse technologies, platforms, and processing environments.
• Good understanding of strategic and emerging technology trends, and the practical application of existing and emerging technologies to new and evolving business and operating models.
• Good understanding of product management, agile principles, project management tools, and development methodologies and capability of supporting agile teams by providing advice and guidance on opportunities, impact, and risks, taking account of technical and architectural debt.
• Experience with diagramming tools such as Microsoft Visio, Gliffy or Lucid Charts
• Experience delivering presentations to senior-level executives as well as business and technical audiences.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Excellent analytical, planning, organizational and technical skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Knowledge of various backend development languages like .NET Java and Python.
• Knowledge of various database technologies like MSSQL/MySQL, Cosmos/Mongo.
• Knowledge of foundational front-end web development languages like JavaScript, HTML and CSS and relevant frameworks that overlay in the ecosystem like react/angular, node, typescript, etc.
• Knowledge of cloud architecture environments, principles and patterns like Azure/AWS IaaS, PaaS, SaaS offerings, serverless computing workloads and multitenancy architectures.
• Knowledge of various aspects of a technology architecture like integration, network and security, with a comprehensive understanding of patterns related to application integration.
• Knowledge of information principles and processes.
• Understanding and knowledge of system development life cycle methodologies (such as waterfall, spiral, agile software development, rapid prototyping, incremental, synchronize and stabilize, and DevOps).
• Understanding and knowledge of IT service management (ITSM) and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
• Knowledge of different modelling languages (such as C4 model, UML).
• Understanding of IT standards and controls.
• Excellent understanding of application development methodologies and APIs/cloud architecture.
• Ability to work with developers in an outsourced environment.
• Other duties as assigned.

Diversity and Inclusion

Davies is committed to being a diverse and inclusive workplace. We welcome candidates of all genders, gender identity and expression, neurodiversity, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, nationality, and belief (or lack thereof).

Benefits

• Medical, Dental, Vision, etc.
• RRSP (Retirement) w/employer contribution
• Fringe Benefits
• Corporate Entertainment Benefits
• HSA (Health Care Savings Account)