Business Architect

Position Title: Niche-Special Exception (IT)
Location: Toronto, ON
Duration: 10 months
             
Story Behind the Need
Business group: Client Engineering – Microservices. Contributes to the overall success of the Digital Banking Engineering MicroServices team in Canada ensuring specific individual goals, plans, initiatives are executed / delivered in support of the team’s business strategies and objectives. Ensures all activities conducted are incompliance with governing regulations, internal policies and procedures.
Project: Supporting loyalty program and 4-10 projects of varying sizes with a primary focus in early phase discovery
Reason for request: To support the on-going need of project discovery & planning activities.
Candidate Value Proposition
The successful candidate will have the opportunity to critical high visibility projects on a very collaborative and growing community of like-minded individuals.
Typical Day in Role:
Act as the bridge between multiple parties including: our business, control functions, technology partners and our engineering teams, responsible for delivering exciting products in the Digital Banking Unit. The Business Architect will be involved in both the project discovery and execution phases, but with a primary focus in project discovery.

• Work with Digital Banking stakeholders (e.g., Product, Design, Engineering, Business Operation, PMO) and contribute to the requirement gathering, estimation, and backlog grooming activities.
• Drive or participate in high-level E2E solutioning and estimations by working closely with business and software architects of MicroService engineering teams, client application teams (Mobile, Web, etc.) as well as the backend teams
• Translate complex problems and challenges into viable technical options and recommendations, Influence business, product, and engineering decisions with solid understanding of the banking systems and technical expertise.
• Manages prioritization, solutioning, and estimation of change requests
• Support project delivery by providing clarifications on scope and requirements as needed.
• Oversee the delivery life cycle to ensure business and functional goals are met with each delivery.

Accountable for managing the engineering backlogs of selected Microservice

• Conduct analysis on non-project driven requests (e.g tech debts, new architectural directions, high priority production issues) and turn them into executable backlog items
• Prioritize backlogs items from various sources (Product, Engineering, Support) with the support of Technical Product Managers; Ensure there is a balance between project delivery and non-project driven priorities
• Collaborate with Senior Development Managers to align project timelines and forecast team capacity
• Serve as the SME of assigned MicroServices, oversee all past and future changes and make suggestions on improvements as needed.
• Maintain MicroServices documentations to ensure that information are up to date and easily accessible by both internal and external teams.
• Champions a customer focused culture, build and maintain relationships with stakeholders such as digital product team and business line

Understand how the Bank’s risk appetite and risk culture should be considered in day-to-day activities and decisions.

• Support process improvement to increase efficiency of the team for project kick-off, project planning and handover, project execution, and project reconciliation
• Champions a high-performance environment and contributes to an inclusive work environment.

Must Have Skills:

• 5+ years’ in business analyst leadership/ functional architect roles within Engineering/Technology
• Strong recent project experience working with the middle-tier services for a customer facing front-end application, which sits in a larger scale ecosystem whose size is comparable to a bank
• Big five experiences, especially Client and client Digital are preferred
• Strong working experience in Agile/Scrum software delivery model.

Nice-To-Have Skills:

• MicroService / API experience
• Loyalty system / project experience
• Experiences as Product Owner or Technical Product Manager/Owner
• Experiences with retail or small business digital banking
• Experiences with project and/or team capacity planning

Soft Skills:

• Decision making: Operates independently day-to-day; receives strategic direction from Engineering leadership
• Excellent problem-solving skills, with demonstrated ability to work with ambiguity, ask the right questions and make decisions under pressure.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with ability to explain complex information for both technical and non-technical audience and to influence decision making across stakeholders.
• Team player who enjoys collaborating with, learning from, and coaching others so we all become better.
• Having an agile mindset and being able to adapt to a dynamic environment with changing priorities

Demonstrated ability to be result-oriented, proactive, and reliable.
Best vs Average: Planning and coming up with a solution is critical to this role and strong experience in this area is required. This resource will be working without a dedicated lead and should be able to wear multiple hats. Experience with team capacity planning and loyalty programs will make for the best fit.
Degrees or certifications:

• University degree in technology, computer science, engineering OR equivalent experience

Candidate Review & Selection:
Structure and Format: One round via MS Teams
– 1st round: Technical/behavioral interview with HM as well other team members, 60 minutes
– Potential second round as needed