Report: Lead Product Solution Architect
Location: Porto
Company
At Kantar, we’re passionate about helping clients grow great brands. We’re experts in advertising, marketing, communications, media, digital, and brand equity research, and we work with 90% of the world’s leading brands. Nobody knows consumers better than Kantar. Providing insight and inspiration to help clients flourish in an outstanding world, we bring together 12 of the world’s leading research, data, and insight brands. Our distributed team of 30,000 people in more than 100 countries delivers specialist insight, business strategies, and consultancy support.
Team
Solution Architecture in Kantar drives innovation by connecting business requirements with a deep understanding of technology.
Our Solution Architecture team needs to be skilled in developing custom solutions of various styles, including SaaS/package-centric solutions. Building high-quality technology solutions is crucial for our success.
Job Purpose
Lead the solution architecture definition for strategic end-to-end solutions, working with technical architects covering each solution component, and Enterprise Architects driving the long-term architectural direction.
Lead cross-functional/team collaboration on the definition and alignment of strategic technology change initiatives.
Architect and deliver innovative and high-quality solutions across the entire business, delivering proof of concepts and innovation prototypes, and ensuring solutions align to our strategic vision.
Guiding our global development teams and partners to deliver against agreed designs and ensuring that solution intent is realized throughout the solution build.
Provide technical leadership across the project lifecycle from inception to completion of an implementation.
Act as a figurehead within a program and domain context.
Act within a team to drive Kantar’s technology platform strategy.
Job Accountabilities
Working with external and internal technology teams and business units to define and outline the solution architecture and high-level designs for all change initiatives.
Collaborating with senior business and technology collaborators to craft high-level requirements and direct focused business analysis activities to assure detailed requirements (functional and non-functional).
Identifying key areas of technical risk or complexity, proposing appropriate Proofs of Concepts (POCs) and prototypes to gain objective evidence to influence the end architectural designs.
Collaborating with the Enterprise Architecture team to define and communicate Kantar's Platform Strategy, bringing together new opportunities and existing technology to align with a new target state architecture.
Engaging with technical leads/architects and SMEs and other solution architects to understand and define the end-to-end solution architecture.
Clearly communicating defined solutions to internal and external collaborators.
Gaining an appropriately deep understanding of the technical solution for each component of your defined architecture, and steering key technology and design decisions.
Assuring and progressing defined solutions through the relevant solution architecture assurance processes, in coordination with our Enterprise Architecture team.
Forming close relationships with Enterprise & Technical architects and maintaining an up-to-date understanding of our technology and business domains.
Holding internal engineering teams and all 3rd parties to account to ensure their documentation and designs meet our architecture standards and align to our defined strategy.
Collaborating with the Service operations teams to define the support model for platforms and components in the end-to-end architecture.
Assess the detailed design for any deviations from our proposed solution architecture and published technology strategies, policies, and standards. Make any necessary corrections to align with our defined strategy.
Key Skills Required
Experience of crafting/implementing a broad range of technology solutions, including:
Data centric solutions, including large scale data processing and integration
Solutions that deal with structured and non-structured data
Highly distributed architectures
A broad technical knowledge, with expertise in SOA and microservices and a good knowledge of at minimum one cloud platform like Azure, AWS, or GCP.
An understanding of the relative strengths and weaknesses of web, data, and cloud technologies, and common architectural patterns.
Able to present solution architecture and strategy to both technology and business audiences with confidence. Can explain complex technical subjects to business colleagues effectively.
The ability to break down large, complex problems into smaller more manageable phases or stages to deliver tangible outputs.
Good knowledge of compliance and regulatory standards (e.g., GDPR).
Active participation & leadership in a maturing architecture practice/community.
Desirable Skills
Experience working with big data platforms and technologies.
Experience working with organizational change and platform strategy.
A strong background as either a software developer or any engineering role.
Why join Kantar?
We shape the brands of tomorrow by better understanding people everywhere. By understanding people, we can understand what drives their decisions, actions, and aspirations on a global scale. And by amplifying our in-depth expertise of human understanding alongside ground-breaking technology, we can help brands find concrete insights that will help them succeed in our fast-paced, ever shifting world.
And because we know people, we like to make sure our own people are being looked after as well. Equality of opportunity for everyone is our highest priority and we support our colleagues to work in a way that supports their health and wellbeing. While we encourage teams to spend part of their working week in the office, we understand no one size fits all; our approach is flexible to ensure everybody feels included, accepted, and that we can win together. We’re dedicated to creating an inclusive culture and value the diversity of our people, clients, suppliers and communities, and we encourage applications from all backgrounds and sections of society. Even if you feel like you’re not an exact match, we’d love to receive your application and talk to you about this job or others at Kantar.