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Director Product Architecture
Pearson
Centennial, CO, United States
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Description
At Pearson, we’re committed to a world that’s always learning and to our talented team who makes it all possible. From bringing lectures vividly to life to turning textbooks into laptop lessons, we are always re-examining the way people learn best, whether it’s one child in our own backyard or an education community across the globe. We are bold thinkers and standout innovators who motivate each other to explore new frontiers in an environment that supports and inspires us to always be better. By pushing the boundaries of technology — and each other to surpass these boundaries — we create seeds of learning that become the catalyst for the world’s innovations, personal and global, large and small.
Summary:
The Director of Product Architecture will play a critical role in making sure our enterprise systems and programs are envisioned, designed, developed and implemented across the enterprise to meet business needs. This person will often be involved at every phase of the project lifecycle from intake through delivery and will be considered one of the leadership team members that have primary responsibility that a solution is well engineered, operable, maintainable, delivered on schedule, aligns to enterprise vision and actually provides the anticipated business value.
SCOPE AND IMPACT OF JOB
This role will work as part of Pearson’s EA and Core platforms team, reporting to the VP Enterprise Architecture. This role may also involve working with product engineering organizations, regional CTOs, Technical Leadership across the lines of business, and other supporting architects to ensure our systems is in alignment with Pearson vision, technology, roadmaps and/or standards. This individual must be able to design systems that cross multiple business areas within our environment, and must think holistically with respect to the integration and operation of many complex components that are configured in a secure, highly available, and highly distributed, manner. This person is expected to understand the industry and have an in depth understanding of the technical standards, software platforms, specifications and policies that are supported within the environment. In addition, these standards and policies need to be the foundation of their design, and, where requested, will be asked to audit, document, and assist in the correction of any issues identified. The candidate is expected to utilize the adopted tools used to support our SDLC to create, design and deliver solutions, and is expected to comply with all established department and personnel policies.
PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES
The Director Product Architecture’s responsibilities will include the following tasks:
• Drive a common product platform strategy, working across various engineering and architecture teams
• Ensures alignment of cross program IT strategy and planning with company's business goals.
• May be responsible for managing a team of architects.
• Takes ownership of driving toward a Global Learning Platform for Pearson.
• Optimizes information management approaches through an understanding of evolving business needs and technology capabilities.
• Develops a long-term strategic utilization plan for the company's IT systems and helps “as is” architectures become “to be” architectures through phasing and cost benefit analysis.
• Promotes the use of shared infrastructure and applications to reduce costs and improve information flows. Ensures that projects do not duplicate functionality or diverge from each other and business and IT strategies.
• Collaborate with other architects and provide a consensus-based enterprise solution that is scalable, adaptable and synchronized with the ever changing business needs.
• Manages risks associated with information and IT assets through the development, use and promotion of the appropriate standards and security policies.
• Involved in direct, or indirect, manner with the development of policies, standards and guidelines that direct the selection, development, implementation and use of information technologies within the enterprise.
• Build employee knowledge and skills in specific areas of expertise.
• Work to settle architecture differences or conflicts existing across the various architecture layers in the enterprise.
• Work with various business and IT stakeholders to demonstrate and show business value of enterprise wide, shared infrastructure or to show value of any new strategic platforms being considered.
• Work with project business and technical staff to capture and validate integration requirements for the project, using industry standard integration and SOA methodologies.
• Design and deliver high quality integration solutions that satisfy project requirements and meet Pearson’s enterprise needs. The quality of the solutions must be assured by following Pearson’s standard best practice for integration development, using agreed industry standards for integration throughout the service development lifecycle.
• Evangelize and explain APIs, SOA, integration and other architecture principles, benefits and technical solutions to business and technical audiences.
Qualifications
Essential Skills and Experience
• Proven experience with software platform architecture including distributed, reusable, and shared software deployed globally
• Proven experience of successful software delivery throughout the software development lifecycle, including substantial experience of working as a senior architect on multiple projects
• Proven experience developing successful API, microservice and integration solutions in an enterprise environment
• Dev Ops background and experience in SaaS and PaaS implementations on both public and private cloud environments such as AWS and Google.
• Strong skills in critical thinking and analysis, meeting facilitation, verbal and written communications, and interpersonal interactions (e.g., partnering, conflict management, consulting, etc.).
• Ability to perform complex analysis of customer provided data using company provided tools and systems.
• Ability to document complex architectural concepts and solutions in both business and technical terms
• Analyzes alternative technology solutions (buy, build, reuse), including assistance in development of any business cases for deviation from standards.
• Knowledge of enterprise architecture design concepts
• Proven capability to understand and meet requirements from both internal and external customers
• Experienced in developing software with good non-functional attributes (high performance, low footprint, scalable, robust, secure etc)
• Proven experience as a successful technical lead, able to guide a technical team effectively
• Proven experience leading a widely distributed team in a global enterprise.
• Proven experience with enterprise integration and roadmapping of ERP, CRM, eCommerce, Identity Management, Product, Content, and other major IT systems
• Proven experience with various architecture disciplines such as security, network, operations, and data architecture
• Experience of integrating with on-site and 3rd party cloud applications
• Proven track record of working in an agile methodology using some level of continuous integration.
• Successful design and implementation in a significant transformational project or very large product delivery program
• Must be on top of current technologies and understand how they might be used to solve challenges today and in the future.
• Must be able to identify and work with stakeholders to collect, aggregate, and evaluate requirements in light of current and future technology, resources, and budgets
• Must be able to understand the overall business strategy to ensure components of the architectural vision align with those of management and other stakeholders
• Must be able to weigh the value of the functionality against the impact of the change to our application ecosystem, resources at hand, and future of the technology landscape
Desirable Skills and Experience
• Designed SaaS platform for B-C apps to deliver customer facing applications that scale to millions of subscribers at peak, while providing a great immersive experience.
• Working knowledge of a significant subset of technologies including: Linux, Java, Spring Framework, Node, Python, ReST/JSON, Cassandra, MongoDB, Oracle, MySQL, Memcached, and Redis.
• Experience with Identity and Access Management technologies such as ForgeRock
• Experience with content driven applications and an understanding of the complexities resulting from integrating software applications and rich media content for delivery to web and mobile devices.
• Experience in designing highly scalable production deployments employing load balancers at a global scale, with a strong knowledge of HTTP 1.1/(2.0), DNS, proxies, caching technologies and other Layer 7 technologies.