Job Description

Job Title: Platform Design Lead

Location: Glasgow

About SLC
Student Loans Company is a non-profit making Government-owned organisation set up in 1989 to provide loans and grants to students in universities and colleges in the UK. We are responsible, in partnership with Local Authorities in England and Wales, the Student Awards Agency for Scotland, the Education and Library boards in Northern Ireland, the Higher Education Institutions and HM Revenue & Customs, for student support delivery in the UK.
Company Mission
We enable our customers to invest in their futures by delivering secure, accurate and efficient assessment, payment and repayment services.
Company Vision
Our vision is to be valued as a digital, customer-focused, centre of excellence.
Job Details
Overview of team:
SLC are building a highly innovative deeply skilled Software Delivery team, to deliver a modern, scalable, secure, resilient and safe multi-tiered architectural platform. This journey will require new levels of competency, process and business engagement.
The Digital and Core Software Delivery teamsare responsible for developing and supporting the customer facing and transactional applications respectively that underpin the services provided to students, higher and further education bodies and governments agencies as well as SLC operational teams.
The teams are structured on a core / flex model working with strategic partners and using a multitude of professional and specialised core in house roles such as Design Leads, (Technical / Business focused), Quality Leads , Platform design Leads and as pertinent to this role Principal Developers.
To be the best we can we are looking for individuals who are passionate about their career, have extensive experience and are keen to develop further applying their talent to the strategic challenges that will be met in the Digital Architecture programme. We want candidates who continually develop themselves keeping up to date with the newest technologies and updates.
Grade:
Grade 5

Reporting to:

ITS Head of Service, G6
Budget Responsibility:
None

Line Management Responsibility:

No line management responsibility, but technical leadership expectation.
Job Purpose:
To provide the key technology leadership to the platform team, supporting the Head of Service to deliver the Student Loans Company’s vision and mission by:
  • Developing an end-to-end understanding of the platform business and application capabilities
  • Implementing the strategy as defined by the Architecture team and leading the solution design for the given platform
  • Representing the delivery teams and working closely with other teams across ITS and the wider business
  • Ensuring seamless integration across systems to provide customers with the best possible digital experience
  • Engaging in early stage of project discovery define the solution and approach
  • Providing technical leadership to colleagues
  • Supporting technology governance, innovation and continuous improvement across teams.
  • Supporting the architecture team in the definition of application and technology roadmaps
Key responsibilities:
Technical
  • Responsible for solution design and documentation within identified areas of a multi-tiered architectural platform
  • To be an active member of technical forums and design clinics, working collaboratively to optimise your own and other’s designs
  • To contribute to the definition and maintenance of the SLC Enterprise Architecture ensuring it reflects the current and future application and technology state
  • To assist with the planning, estimation and prioritisation of software delivery effort
  • Promote adoption of industry best practice in design and development across SLC
  • Support development of technical solutions by providing guidance and assurance on project high level solution designs
  • Assure third party solution designs
  • Chair technical forums for the platform
  • Encourage close collaboration across technical teams
  • Responsible for maintainingplatform artefacts (including application, technology and data model repositories) on behalf of delivery team
  • Mentor technical resources
  • Implementation of strategic roadmaps
  • Ensure operational integrity of platform, including considerations of business as usual support and operational maintenance activity.
  • Ensure all projects are implemented in alignment with overall architecture and technology governance
  • Defining and guiding choice of development toolset
  • Participate in the development/review and adoption of Technical Architectural goals, principles, practices, and standards
Strategic Development & Innovation
  • To assist in the definition of the company’s technical vision, strategy and roadmaps
  • To promote innovation by leading and/or participating in research and development activities using new technologies, tools and techniques; carrying out realistic trials of new technologies in order to demonstrate their applicability in an SLC context
Key Relationships
  • To work closely with the Architecture team to translate strategic architecture roadmaps into implementation projects
  • To work collaboratively with customers, business and technical colleagues in the scoping of solution designs in support of individual projects within the context of a wider programme of work
  • To mentor and support the technical communityand promote the SLC design and development standards and governance of solution design.
  • To communicate the platform roadmap and evolution to multiple audiences at all levels, including senior executives and board level
  • To support programme level decision-making and prioritisation of work, ensuring that the operational integrity of the platform is a key influencing factor
  • To assist with the planning, estimation and prioritisation of new projects and initiatives
  • As subject matter expert, represent the platform in discovery/inception workshops in order to facilitate the understanding of customer needs and facilitate the production of technical designs
  • To collaborate with other teams to ensure projects are delivered effectively into service and the end-to-end solution is fit for purpose. For example:- DevOps, Infrastructure, Security, Integration, Change Management and Service Management teams.
Leadership
  • To represent the team and company professionally in all engagements
  • To act as an ambassador for SLC and to promote SLC’s architecture vision to internal and external stakeholders, and other organisations both inside and outside government
  • To provide leadership for Technical colleagues, supporting them in their personal development and career aspirations
Governance/Assurance
  • To undertake design assurance on key projects ensuring that changes to the architecture take account of relevant goals, principles, practices, strategies, roadmaps, policies, standards while assessing the impact that the changes will have on other projects
  • To ensure appropriate assurance is conducted on artefacts produced by projects.
Continuous Improvement
  • To gather and analyse feedback on the SLC Enterprise Architecture framework and continuously improve the meta-models, processes and tools, taking into account industry best practice
  • To lead and/or participate in post implementation reviews to assess the extent to which expected business and technical benefits were realised, and to record successes and suggest improvements to the architecture, design and delivery processes
Recruitment
  • Support the recruitment of technical resources.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience:

Education / Qualifications
  • Degree level education or equivalent
Essential
  • Strong experience in a wide range of the following areas:
-Strong software development experience across full software development lifecycle
-Design and/or development of applications in a multi-tiered environment using the Java language and related technologies
-Design and/or development of applications in an Oracle 12c database environment and related technologies – Oracle Forms, PL/SQL
-Design of data stores using relational and/or no sql databases (e.g. MongoDB)
-Data modelling including design and maintenance of conceptual, logical and physical data models
-Design and/or development of applications that use asynchronous messaging systems for integration
-Working with software delivery partners in a multi-vendor environment, including pre-Contract engagement, preparation of invitations to tender and tender evaluation
-Contributing to business cases to support future projects
-Agile and Waterfall project delivery methodologies
-Knowledge of continuous integration tools and techniques
  • Experience in providing estimates/sizing
  • Excellent written communication skills including technical writing
  • Excellent verbal communication skills presenting to technical and non-technical audiences
  • Ability to self-start and to work autonomously as well as in a team
  • Strong specialist experience in core area – depending on team:
-Design and/or development of either
  • Data Warehousing and Analytics / Inbound and Outbound Communications/Data Quality solutions
  • Customer facing web applications / Customer self-service portals
  • Integration platforms
Desirable
-Awareness of enterprise architecture frameworks
-Cloud Services
-Enterprise integration patterns and tooling.
-Web services design and/or development – SOAP / REST
-CI/CD techniques
-Experience of building and scaling high-traffic websites
-Experience of UX, accessibility, user testing techniques

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