Lead Architect - Service Design

Job description / Role

One of the leading banks in the Middle East is on the look out for a Lead Architect - Service Design for their office in Abu Dhabi.

The Technology Design (Solution Architecture) team is one of the key towers within the IT Delivery organisation and is responsible for ensuring delivery of highest quality solution design for all software development across all businesses in the firm. The team is responsible for the delivery across BAU and projects work stream and delivers design for multiple concurrent projects for several internal and external stakeholders.

The Service Design Team belongs to the Technology Design Vertical. The Services Design Team is responsible for architecting business / technology service and integration aspects for all initiatives undertaken by the Technology Design Team. The business areas covered are Consumer, Wholesale, Treasury, FI, Islamic Banking, Aseel, Central Operations, Support Functions - HR, Admin, FGFS, Financial Control and International Business units – Libya, Singapore and Qatar.

The role will support efforts of the Design team to deliver services to the business users in an efficient manner. The role encompasses the design of the solutions, management of the solution delivery (until handoff to another team) and the governance of the process. The role supports all stakeholders involved in the solution design and delivery process.

KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES:

Solution Design:
- Proactively anticipate business needs for new services and initiate implementation
- Continuously analyse gaps between business requirements and the existing capabilities in terms of the services and business applications that are available in the existing the landscape, and recommend solutions to close the gaps
- Review business requirement(s) and potential solutions produced by the Domain Architects for Consumer, Wholesale, Treasury and Support Functions from a SOA perspective
- Support management’s key decisions such as the evaluation and selection of appropriate business applications to offer a robust solution to satisfy the business requirement
- Define and articulate services and associated attributes to key stakeholders
- Develop strong understanding of existing services in order to efficiently reuse existing services whenever possible
- Enhance design standards and enforces them in deliverables

Management:
- Ensure smooth transition of service design to development, testing and other project stakeholders
- Establish system that supports the traceability of deliverables from requirement through design to implementation
- Ensure relationship is maintained with all internal and external stakeholders when transitioning deliverables and imparting know how in all initiatives
- Collaborate with Domain, Infrastructure, Security and Data Architects to ensure successful end-to-end delivery of design

Governance:
- Maintain change ownership of Service Catalogue for the Bank and find opportunities to enhance the service landscape
- Enforce SOA design principles / governance on all initiatives
- Ensure deliverables are compliant to the security and compliance policies of the bank-

BUSINESS ACCOUNTABILITY:
- Understand various existing business services, the underlying applications in IT Landscape which will have impact on Banking business
- Perform effective design reviews to ensure that no gaps are created in design
- Design sustainable and high performing solutions

Requirements

- 8+ years IT experience in a service oriented design environment, preferably in banks
- Required at least 3+ years of experience conducting analysis and modelling solutions using RSA and RTC, good understating of IBM Modelling Tools - RRC, RQM
- Experience in business process modelling tools (e.g. UML), information architecture (wireframes etc)
- Has been a SOA practitioner with experience with at least 2 SOA transformation exercises and in depth understanding of design elements, Service Oriented Computing, Service Orientation and Design Principles
- Fair understanding of Enterprise Architecture Frameworks (such as BIAN) and has used these in SOA implementations
- TOGAF Foundation Certification is mandatory
- High-level understanding of key business domains - Consumer Banking, Wholesale Banking, Treasury and the Support Functions in a bank
- Experience with the delivery processes on RUP, Agile
- Detailed understanding of Technology integration concepts - Web Services, ESB, SOAP, WSDL, BPEL, XML, XSD
- Prior hands on experience in implementing banking solutions using IBM Tools - IBM Websphere - Application Server, Message Broker / Queue, Data Power, Service Registry, Portal, ESB (IBM Integration Bus) and Business Process Manager
- Has hands on experience in BPEL to support orchestration of web services
- Experience with the various stages of project lifecycle including requirements analysis, design, build/configuration, testing, roll out, monitoring / maintenance phases.

Skills:
- Highly proficient skills in English, both written and verbal
- Ability to develop and maintain meaningful relationships with IT / Partners / Business stakeholders
- Certification in SOA, preferably IBM, is an added advantage
- Strong team player
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
- Ability to work under pressure and willing to go the extra miles to meet the project timelines/goals
- Well organized with attention to detail

About the Company

AXIZ Consulting is based in the Dubai International Finance Centre and offers a bespoke, highly consultative recruitment service to local and international organisations across the GCC in both professional services and primary industries. Its founding two members come from a blend of executive search and contingent recruitment and they have taken some of the best practices of executive search and applied this to contingent recruitment in order to produce a service which offers maximum value to clients.

In order for us to build a successful company, we identified a core aim: to offer our clients a service that surpasses that of our competition. In order to do this, we have put into place both internal and external processes that ensure clients receive a consistent and professional service which gets the right results, in the right way.