Consulting Architect

Job Description

The Rackspace Consulting Architecture team provides guidance, advice and best-practice to customers in their digital transformations. We develop future-proof technical solutions for complex business problems. We architect for innovation.

The adoption of public cloud is growing rapidly. Rackspace is a trusted partner to many organizations who have embarked on this journey. Through well-established transformation methods and by using best practices, we are helping customers to change the way they do business.

Job description:

As a consulting cloud architect, you will be engaging with customers and the wider Rackspace organization to advise, develop and deliver innovative solutions leveraging a wide range of public cloud services. The primary focus will be on helping customers to re-think their technical platforms and application landscapes and drive adoption of cloud-native technologies and innovation.

This is a new role within Rackspace. As such, this role is particularly well-suited to a self-starting, experienced and motivated consultant, who has a proven track record in designing and migrating systems to the cloud.

Primary objectives:

• Work with customers and the wider Rackspace organizations on re-thinking and re-designing IT landscapes using cloud-native technologies
• Design and deliver innovative Proof of Concepts for customers
• Provide guidance to customers on their cloud journeys and establish a long-term trusted advisor role
• Evangelize the cloud-native paradigm through the delivery of blogs, customer presentations and public speaking engagements
• Establish best-practices for the consultancy resulting in standardized engagement models and repeatable ways-of-working
• Mentor and train other architects within the wider Rackspace Solutions Architecture community on modern cloud-native software patterns

Job requirements

The ideal candidate has a proven track record in designing and delivering innovative technology solutions built on the cloud. As a senior architect, the person should be comfortable engaging at all levels of the customer’s business, from working with senior/C-level leadership to guiding it-specialists and developers on building solutions.

Extensive experience of creating platforms on Amazon Webservices, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform is essential. Demonstrable experience in designing and implementing cloud-native systems and/or rebuilding an existing system on the cloud is required.

Must have the ability to lead architectural engagements, either directly or as part of a larger programme of work and take ownership for the successful delivery of customer value within budget, time and scope.

Acting as a thought-leader, the right candidate is able to concisely and articulately present to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Essentials:

You have built specialist and demonstrable architectural knowledge in at least one of the following areas:

• Cloud platform architecture
• Cloud-native application architecture (incuding Devops and CI/CD)
• Enterprise and business architecture
• Security and governance

Must have client-facing consultancy experience within large enterprises, but happy to deliver to SMBs

You have an articulate opinion on the advantages of using public cloud platforms from a business perspective

You can identify and plan to resolve the challenges, both technical and organizational, facing organizations who are moving their applications to the cloud

Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills are required.

Experience working within frameworks such as TOGAF and COBIT. In-depth knowledge of the frameworks and best practices of the major cloud players, such as the AWS Well-Architected Framework

Certified as a professional architect on at least one of the major public cloud platforms (Aws, Azure, GCP) and/or as an enterprise architect

Willingness to travel and split time between work on site at customer locations and Rackspace offices. The team will service customers across the EMEA region. Regular engagements of three weeks at customer sites are to be expected.

As part of your role, you will:

• Deliver high-quality work to customers as part of consulting engagements that can be delivered through workshops, presentations or solutions architecture designs
• Drive the engagements with customers from the architectural pillar, from design to delivery
• Work in close collaboration with other architects, technical consultants and professional services teams within Rackspace and customer’s teams
• Work with customers across the EMEA region depending on customer location
• Contribute to the cloud architect community within Rackspace and beyond by speaking at internal and external events
• Actively identify opportunities for new engagements
• Contribute to RFI/RFP requests