Data Architect Lead/Agile Program Manager- REMOTE

Remote Core Solutions provides outsourcing solutions. Our client companies range from small businesses to large corporations, and we pride ourselves on matching candidates with roles where they can thrive and make a significant impact.

About the role: 

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Data Architect Lead for our Global Investments strategic program to join our project team. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in data architecture, investment management domain, technology, data, and with supporting large technology implementation projects. The position would work closely with both development teams and Mercer investments data team.

• Focus on software development life cycle, you will collaborate with our Head of Technology Strategy, Head of Data, Solution Architects, Data Analysts, Data Team, and Portfolio Delivery function Leads to understand customer and technical needs to design and implement the Global Investment data platform, including Persistence, Integration and Services layers of the business solutions in compliance with architecture principles and standards followed by MMC technology.
• You will coordinate with business and technology team leads for the creation and maintenance of the LOB standardized interface layer as well as data model and catalog.
• You will form part of the Pod Leadership team tasked with bringing your architectural vision to fruition utilizing agile methodologies and assist the senior pod lead with the day to day oversight of the development team. You will elaborate your architecture designs and collaborate with our infrastructure and development teams to enable implementation of them with light touch oversight.
• We in Product Delivery Engineering are on a mission: to transform the way our Mercer business and IT teams work together to unlock the benefits of rapid delivery of quality, secure software to market by empowered teams. We will do this by rolling out our Agile at Scale Delivery model. You will oversee teams and will be responsible for their delivery of working software through to production.

Responsibilities: 

• Work with our partners to understand business and technology problems and/or opportunities
• Partner strongly with the head of data and the data team and data analysts. The head of data and data team will be responsible for setting a large amount of the requirements, but will hold short on technical design and physical modeling which this role will need to elaborate on.
• Provide guidance and governance on standardized business logical data models, component re-use and platform modernization with an eye to designing business friendly views of data to empower citizen data scientists and BI users to leverage the data platform.
• Lead the data design track, document and communicate solution that accommodate the Agile Principles of fail fast and provide the resilience necessary to accommodate changing and fluid requirements
• In partnership with the data team, assist in the implementation of Data Governance Standards and Processes; partner with business stakeholders to establish a cadence in the upkeep of their information assets
• Establish data domains for the Wealth/Global Investments business for reuse, standardization and security-by-design into your designs to simplify, secure and enable accelerated solution delivery.
• Assist in the establishment of a self-governance operating model to manage data models and catalogs for the wealth/global investments business.
• Bring a shift left mentality in maintenance of the business data terms, critical data elements as well as business rules.
• Introduce learning capsules to enable self service capabilities for management of business data catalog and allied assets
• Be innovative in your design thinking and use your expertise to influence the MMC technology roadmap
• Take your architectural designs through our on boarding processes to ensure they meet MMCs standards and conventions
• Participate in architecture reviews as part of MMCs Architecture Assurance process
• Support the implementation of architectural designs from infrastructure set up through to delivery as necessary
• Empower the development teams to deliver your architectural designs with a light touch approach
• Be an involved member in our technology community, championing the latest technologies and trends within MMC and the wider industry, sharing your knowledge, successes and learnings with your colleagues.
• Run the software delivery Pod ensuring there are smooth and efficient processes for getting software through from requirements to working in production focussing on value creation, growth and serving customers
• Makes outcomes that leads to project success, and work with Product Owner and Business Analysts to help project team prioritize and groom backlog in order to deliver an Alpha early, then continue to deliver value often throughout the project lifecycle to staging and production environments.
• You will have an Enterprise mind-set able to foster collaboration, break down silos, identify and work to remove blockers
• You will be intimately familiar with the Agile processes and practices required for successful and sustainable delivery. Solid understanding of Software Development, Architecture, Test Engineering and Security best practice in an Agile environment
• Pods support the full lifecycle of a product and we operate on the philosophy that the work comes to the team. You will need to consider tech debt, obsolescence, security and modernisation
• Working with the wider team to plan complex product releases
• Ensure our standard metrics are visible and actively being used to drive drawing conclusions
• Own the Continuous Improvement backlog for the Pod. This is the key mechanism by which we deliver improvements for the following: time to market, efficiency and quality

Qualifications:

• Deep previous experience in the investment management industry and common applicable data domains (clients, portfolios, funds, holdings, transactions, trades, securities/investments, ESG, analytics, performance, IBOR/ABOR/TBOR, benchmarks/indices).
• Deep understanding of business and the ability to translate them to conceptual, Logical and Physical data model designs when required
• Deep understanding of integration design patterns and reporting solutions
• Self-motivated to excel in a remote position, collaborating effectively with remote teams across the globe.
• You are a self-starter; you can take initiative without waiting for direction.
• The ability to work in a fast-paced environment with changing priorities and deadlines
• You are used to working and communicating with both business and technical stakeholders at varying levels of seniority
• Extensive experience in designing and communicating technology solutions that can be traced back to requirements
• An inquisitive mind set with a track record of seeking out and implementing new technologies and architectural patterns
• Ability to support self-governance process by instilling discipline and establishing cadence with our business SME partners to ensure completeness in information assets generated in support of the solution
• Ability to work effectively with distributed teams across the globe. The business we are supporting is global and our development teams are also in differing regions.
• Significant organizational Agile transformation experience and be able to demonstrate proven strategies. Mercer has a complex technological landscape and a large portfolio of revenue generating applications. We also have significant security processes and legislative requirements to protect our customers and their data
• Previous experience of Agile Program management (e.g. RTE role)
• Experience of a wide range of Technology roles is desirable, ideally with some form of development engineering or Agile Program management background

Technical Skills:

• Significant experience with the following technologies, architectures & methodologies:
• Nifi, Python, kafka, Databricks, Informatica or any other integration technologies
• Data modeling tools such as Hackolade, Er-Win
• Big Data / Data Lakehouse / traditional RDBMS/data warehouse/mart
• Industry standard Metadata management product Collibra, Informatica EDC/AXON/CDGC
• Data Management Principles and Data Governance Lifecycle and standards and tooling
• Deep understanding of secure data service architecture. Expert in data services design, Secure by Design concepts, Microservices, Structure SQL and other query patterns
• Cloud Infrastructure architecture, Containerization / Kubernetes
• Secure DevOps; Application Performance Monitoring (APM) techniques; SDLC Agile / Hybrid / Waterfall
• Experience with building solutions with Databricks.
• Experience with Snowflake (for data sharing) and Athena a plus.
• Experience working in AWS.
• Experience in building denormalzied data warehouses (star schemas, fact dimensional modeling) for citizen developer/BI user users.

What would make you stand out?

• Experience in running agile teams from a day to day leadership perspective.
• Prior experience in implementations involving State Street Alpha and Factset solutions.
• Prior experience integrating Snowflake and Databricks
• Prior experience building an investments data warehouse covering common data domains (clients, portfolios, funds, holdings, transactions, trades, securities/investments, ESG, analytics, performance, IBOR/ABOR/TBOR, benchmarks/indices) or with vended products that provide similar functions (e.g. Eagle, State Street Alpha platform)
• Prior experience in data science/AI/BI tools.
• Relevant technical and/or investment domain certifications (e.g. CFA)
• Prior experience working with an OCIO investment manager involving a mix of traditional and alternative asset classes.
• Prior experience with firm that has successfully enabled citizen development and BI modeling in a well governed way in partnership with technology.