Principal Solution Architect

Company Description

The British Airways (BA) Architecture & Engineering team is part of BA Digital within the International Airlines Group (IAG), one of the world’s leading airline groups and owner of some of the biggest brands in the sky. 

With a diverse workforce spread across four countries, IAG GBS provides creative and innovative solutions to drive sustainable transformation by delivering finance, procurement and airline services, as well as group-wide systems across IAG. Each operating company benefits from the GBS centralised model, driving efficiencies, automation and economies of scale. 

IAG Tech’s vision is to delight customers, enable our colleagues, accelerate business performance, increase shareholder value, and protect our business through the innovative and agile use of technology and data to become the most trusted digital airline.

To harness our full potential across BA Digital, we are changing fundamentally our ways of working by transitioning at speed into a Product led organisation.

Together we are building a better BA (British Airways).

Job Description

A Principal Solution Architect is required to be embedded within our delivery squads delivering products across our customer journeys.

Purpose of the role

• Guide the solution architecture for the Head of Solution Architecture across their area, effectively influencing stakeholders to help define and deliver the future state adhering to policies, standards, and roadmaps. 

• Defines solutions to complex business problems using a wide range of artefacts, methods and tools and uses expertise and knowledge within a specific area to drive the transformational change of applications. 

• Facilitates the structuring of business problems to ensure functional and non-functional requirements are clearly understood, aligned with business objectives and are traceable in the technical solution design. During the implementation phase, ensures any deviations from the agreed solution are managed with the project to deliver a successful outcome.

• Maintains a view of business and technical capabilities and applications across their area ensuring technical integrity and alignment with business requirements and the ongoing support of applications in line with obsolescence and security requirements.

• Understands and manages the technical quality of the solutions in their area, ensuring short term technical debts are managed, and paydown plans are developed to ensure long term health of solutions is assured. 

• Identification and execution of continual improvement opportunities, ensuring the best outcomes for BA, driving optimal solutions through the implementation of the architecture roadmaps. 

• Management of key supplier relationships, ensuring the quality of supplier deliverables meets BA Digital standards and fit with strategic business requirements on a continuing basis. 

• Identify opportunities to work across BA Digital to underpin the successful delivery of major initiatives. 

Accountabilities

Working in partnership with BA Digital and the business to: 

• Provide technical leadership across several business or technical domains and the expertise to drive forward solutions, ensuring alignment with the business and technical strategic vision and goals.

• Provide expertise to the Business, Heads of Delivery, Technical Area Leads etc. and their teams in relation to all aspects of Solution Architecture. 

• Collaborate with Architects in their immediate and wider areas to ensure solutions are fit for purpose and aligned with business and technical architectures and strategic direction. 

• Ensure all solution architecture activity across their area is aligned with policies and standards and roadmaps with a focus on consistency and efficiency of approach ensuring a balance between quality, cost and timescales. Identifies and resolves any potential non-compliance.

• Ensure best in class solutions that minimise customisation, through Solution design that integrates world-class applications. 

• Recognise opportunities for business or IT change, communicates them persuasively to appropriate stakeholders with support from Lead Enterprise Architect. 

• Follow the agreed methods and tools for architecture and promote and support these.

• Lead, coach, mentor and manage solution architects within their domain to enable their development and guide their performance. 

• Communicate and negotiate with all relevant stakeholders (both business and IT) to ensure a balance of usability and fit with the solution architecture with support from the Lead Solution Architect. 

• Ensure sufficient quality review points are built into initiatives, that all interdependencies have been considered and an appropriate level of architectural artefacts produced. 

• Lead architectural reviews across their area to promote consistency, quality, and learning. 

• Support strategic supplier relationships where third-party work or packages involve significant architectural decisions. 

• Participate proactively in solution and program Agile Ceremonies including system and program increment demos, and input into solution and program backlogs and management of capture of and prioritisation of capabilities and enablers e. g., become the voice of quality in estimation and backlog refinement sessions, collaborating with the team to identify and implement improvements via sprint retrospectives.

• Proactively share best practices, patterns, and templates for Solution Architectures with the wider solution architecture community 

• Develop, curate, and select appropriate learning and development plans for stakeholders, team members and external partners to ensure alignment on capability needs. 

• Collaborate with Stakeholders to develop technical roadmaps to deliver the functional goals of their domain, ensuring that solutions are open to extension, and development over their lifetime. 

• Stay up to date with emerging technologies and adapt your expertise to harness them in BA Digital. 

• This role may require some travel and working from multiple sites/locations within UK and internationally. You must be willing and able to travel to participate in meetings, workshops and other related activities. 

  
  

Qualifications

• Educated to degree level or equivalent

• Recognised architecture qualification desirable. 

• TOGAF level 1 certification desirable 

• AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification desirable, other cloud certifications acceptable. 

• SAFe 5 Architect (ARCH) or other Agile process qualifications

Skills

• Demonstrates clear leadership and an ability to form strong stakeholder relationships at all levels of the organization. 

• A proven ability of influencing and persuading internally and externally at senior levels, guiding by example and aligning stakeholder groups around a common vision. 

• Complex problem solving with an ability to resolve conflict and identify best-fit solutions to challenges encountered. 

• Business partnering, working collaboratively as a valued partner with senior stakeholders across a diverse operation, delivering a value-added service to business customers and balancing and finding compromises between opposing views and opinions. 

• Ability to recognise priorities and guide others towards the accomplishment of strategic business goals and objectives. 

• Embracing and managing both business and IT change as necessary to help shape future direction.

• Ability to work under pressure. 

• Innovation - transforming industry trends into practical, cost-effective solutions.

• Fluent written and spoken English 

The following skills are desirable:

• Knowledge of Cloud Architecture Patterns and Techniques 

• Cost of Operations in Cloud Solutions 

• Estimation and Sizing of work items 

• Knowledge of different application architectures and methods to evaluate and choose appropriately 

• Experience of Different delivery methods, and incremental value delivery. 

• Experience of Hybrid Architectures with edge compute 

• Design for Testability, Maintainability, and Reliability 

• Knowledge of Observability and Management patterns for complex architectures 

• Foundational knowledge of secure computing practices 

• Foundational knowledge of data storage architectures, and design patterns for implementing solutions with different access needs. 

• Design and Analysis of VPC infrastructure 

Experience

• Proven record of accomplishment of leading complex solution architectures working across the architecture domains (business, data, applications, and technology) with experience of several business domains and/or technology areas. 

• Broad solution architecture experience including application development, enterprise integration, service definition and Service-Level Agreements, IT infrastructure and migration planning. 

• Experience of resolving complex solution architecture challenges and managing both business and IT change to help shape future directions. 

• Proven record of accomplishment of successful stakeholder management at a senior level, with a proven ability of influencing and persuading across the organisation. 

• Experience of and contribution to applicable best practice and/or methodologies and their effective application. 

• Demonstrable awareness of worldwide architecture and technology trends and practice, championing their use to deliver business benefit. 

• Experience of operating across multiple countries and cultures is desirable, but not essential.