Solution Architect - SC Cleared
Max Rate: £525 a day (Inside IR35)
Duration: Initailly 6 months with a strong chance of extension
Clearance required: SC
Location: London, Croydon - largely remote
You will join a global IT Consultancy delivering digital transformation to the Home Office.
Solution Architects are required for one of the largest AWS based developer platforms in the UK, which supports 100+ teams and runs multiple critical workloads. The work you will take on is split into three key areas. Firstly, architects pick up new requirements from our teams, understand their needs, proposing options and getting the design governed and into delivery teams. Due to the scale of the platform, solutions often touch multiple areas and close working with other architects is essential to ensure 'tribal knowledge' is exploited. The second area is supporting teams with delivery and service. Inevitably delivery teams encounter problems in delivering against the roadmap or with incidents that need architect support to analyse and resolve. Lastly, architects work on longer term strategies or ad hoc pieces of work delegated by the Senior Management Team.
Key Skills and Experience
Mandatory
* Strong understanding of core AWS services; VPCs, subnets, EC2, lambda, s3, route 53, VPC endpoints
* Good understanding of networking - TCP/IP, DNS, routing, proxy patterns
* Good understanding of containers and Kubernetes (does not require detailed Kubernetes knowledge, more the broad architecture)
* Design documentation skills
* Influencing, negotiating & pragmatism - getting designs through assurance processes
* Problem solving and options analysis
* Evidence based decision making
* Excellent communication skills, ranging from getting a junior engineer's input into a design to explaining a complex technical issue to a senior leader
Optional
Our architects work across a wide range of technologies and as such are expected to be able to quickly learn and adapt to unfamiliar tools. Whilst not essential, it is desirable architects have expertise in the following;
* Elasticsearch Stack
* Dynatrace
* Prometheus & Grafana
* AWS EKS & KOPS
* Hashicorp Consul
* Hashicorp Vault
* VPNs - e.g. OpenVPN, Fortigate site to site VPNs
* Atlassian tooling - e.g. Bitbucket, confluence, JIRA, Crowd
* AWS Workspaces
* LDAP
* Redhat SSO & OIDC
* Firewalling technologies - e.g. AWS Network Firewall, Fortigate
* Proxy Servers - e.g. nginx, openresty, squid, fortiweb
* DevOps - e.g. Terraform, Concourse, Sonarqube
* Transit Gateway