Solutions Architect

Overview

Role: Solutions Architect

Location: UK Flexible

Role ID: 2023-1801

Our vision is to create a safe and sustainable world

Ricardo plc is a global strategic, environmental, and engineering consulting company, listed on the London Stock Exchange. With over 100 years of engineering excellence and employing close to 3,000 employees in more than 20 countries, we provide exceptional levels of expertise in delivering leading-edge and innovative cross-sector sustainable products and solutions. Every day, we enable our customers to solve the most complex and dynamic challenges to help achieve a safe and sustainable world.

Energy & Environment, one of Ricardo plc’s five operating business units, is a leader in sustainability consultancy, solving complex environmental challenges through industry-leading analysis, advice and data. With more than 40 years of heritage in addressing air quality, environmental and sustainability issues, our customers value us for our deep understanding and breadth of services covering the entire value chain from evidence, policy & strategy to implementation.

Our Digital Services team work in collaboration with Ricardo’s wide range of internationally recognised environmental experts and scientists across key environmental sectors, creating new and innovative solutions to tackle some of the world’s most pressing challenges. With some exciting growth plans you’ll be joining the digital services team with opportunities to work on a wide variety of digital projects and technically challenging work both nationally and internationally.

To successfully align IT solutions with business objectives, our solutions architect must have strong leadership and communication skills, as well as both technical and business knowledge. As a solutions architect, you will need to understand the business side of the organisation to decide how to formulate the right IT solution that will fit our clients’ goals. Your leadership skills will be important for steering the overall process of identifying key business objectives and determining the requirements for each solution. You'll be client-facing and build an understanding of requirements to drive customer satisfaction and set proper expectations for the end-product.

As a solutions architect within our team, you’ll work across each of our environmental business sectors producing architectural solutions that meet and support some of the world’s most complex environmental system challenges. You’ll provide concept solutions within a business development context as well as for bid proposals. You’ll also be competent supporting our business consultants by providing a broad range of technical and strategic inputs whilst playing an important technical leadership role for the business.

Overall, the successful candidate will be responsible for the software development architecture, high-level technical design and overall technical leadership for our propositions. The role is both a pre-sales role and a delivery role, as such the successful individual will be providing the knowledge and governance to ensure that the delivery of Ricardo EE software is optimised and suitable to meet the needs of our clients.

You'll also adept in a range of peripheral skills that support your well rounded capability including:

• Work with our QA leads to formulate testing requirements.
• Identify further areas where IT can support business needs and goals.
• Build and migrate software and services.
• Work with the scrum masters to mobilise projects efficiently in an iterative manner
• Evaluating business needs and determining how Digital Services can support those needs leveraging software and infrastructure.
• Help determine, develop, and improve technical solutions in support of business goals (i.e. approach to refactoring legacy projects).
• Support communication between Digital Services and other business operations to ensure everyone is aligned in developing and implementing technical solutions correctly.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Responsibility for the overall Solution Architecture across a range of technologies, with core focus on open-source Symfony, REACT and VueJS based projects and latterly with C#.net projects
• During bid stages be responsible for the selection of appropriate technologies, architecture diagrams and writing content to support.
• Understanding the business and non-functional requirements, and to identify a suitable architecture that best meets any relevant budgetary and/or timescale constraints.
• Broad awareness and a passion to maintain up to date knowledge within the digital industry.
• The ability to identify and advise on broader technology requirements beyond application development (e.g. software, hardware, networking, 3rd party products)
• Detail orientated, the ability to delve into and understand overarching business requirements (commercial, organisational) and technical requirements (enterprise architecture, data ownership, technical strategy) of the customer.
• Delivering Architecture and related technical documentation to a high level of quality and ability to communicate technical concepts verbally and in written form to a variety of technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to demonstrate, communicate and implement recognised frameworks, design patterns, tools and standards in relation to both open source and ideally Microsoft technology stacks.
• Ability to impartially assess new technologies, products and frameworks and compare potential solutions.
• Showcasing our capability to senior clients.
• Presenting our technical offerings.
• Lead brainstorming sessions to develop potential solutions for business needs or problems.
• Identify opportunities for process improvements.
• Identify areas across the business unit where Digital Services can support business needs and goals.
• Work with business units to develop IT strategies and to improve current IT implementations.
• Build software and services for the organisation.
• Work with product owners and delivery teams to develop scalable solutions and products.
• Communicate and consult with clients and internal stakeholders to develop appropriate solutions.
• You must be prepared to work closely and align with the Development Manager, business leaders, managers, and employees across EE and other Ricardo business units.
• Work with clients to understand expectations and requirements.

Essential Experience/Skills

• Software Industry experience including the full development lifecycle.
• A strong background as a software developer.
• Strong and demonstrable experience in developing enterprise level applications.
• Good working knowledge of a range of technical frameworks, such as MVC, Web Tier frameworks.
• Commercial experience of implementing SOA and web service design principles and other design patterns.
• Experience with modelling and UML.

Desired Experience/Skills

• Experience with ITIL and audits.
• An understanding of UK Government Service Manual and associated Standards.
• Experience in the design, development and deployment of solutions that utlilse the following technologies - PHP, MySQL, MariaDb, PostGIS, Ajax, Symfony, VueJS, Drupal, C#.NET, SQL Server, XML, Javascript, REACT
• Experience of providing GIS solutions is desirable.
• Experience in a consulting firm would be advantageous.
• Understanding business, system, information, security, application and technology architecture.
• Developing cloud infrastructure, implementing microservices and adopting security measures for data, systems, and networks.

Personal Attributes

• Customer facing and commercially orientated.
• Recognise inefficiency and have the drive to recommend/implement improvements.
• Excellent organisation and ability to prioritise time.
• Passion for technology.
• Adaptable and flexible to meet workload demands.
• Self-motivated and enthusiastic with a proactive approach to work.
• Thorough & quality conscious.
• Able to work under pressure and to tight timescales.
• Willing to travel on an ad-hoc basis to client sites.

Other desirable technical skills/ background:

• AWS and (ideally) Azure.
• Apache.
• Data Management.
• Software Development LifeCycle.
• Big Data Analytics.
• Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
• Experience with enterprise architecture.
• Understanding of IT security, infrastructure, and governance.

Working here

Ricardo is an exciting and rewarding place to work and you have the opportunity to make a difference. You will work with teams of talented, dedicated, and supportive individuals. Alongside having a fantastic opportunity to develop your career with us through our broad range of projects, mentoring opportunities and a personalised approach to your learning and development. We are always keen to hear from people who have driven, ambition and a flair for innovative thinking.

Wellbeing and work life balance

We offer flexible approaches to work, whether that's working from home, being in the office, or as a hybrid worker. We're happy to discuss flexible working arrangements. Wellbeing is at the core to our culture, allowing employees to flourish and to achieve their full potential. Our People are important to us, and we take pride in our wellbeing programmes and policies that support individuals including flexible working, carers policy, mental health first aiders and readily available support through our extensive Employee Assistance programme.

Diversity, Equality and Inclusion statement

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer, we believe in each person's potential, and we'll help you reach yours. We have an ambitious diversity, equality, and inclusion approach as explained here. We value diversity; recognising that a more diverse workforce creates a richer and more varied working environment. Diversity also drives innovation, by allowing us to offer our clients the best consultancy service that we can. As part of our commitment to engage positively and pro-actively with all our employees and ensure a culture of inclusivity, we are a recognised as a 'disability confident' employer.

Benefits

Our core benefits include 25 days' annual leave, plus 8 flexible bank holidays, a competitive company pension scheme, life assurance and professional subscriptions reimbursement. We also offer a wide range of flexible benefits to suit your lifestyle.

Once you have submitted your application a member of our Recruitment Team will be in touch. Please be aware that the timing can vary dependent on the volume of applications that we receive for each role and in some cases, we may start to review applications prior to the closing date.