Cloud Solutions Architect

Job Description

Overview

Rackspace, a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud MSPs, consistently features in the top 100 best places to work. We are looking for Solutions Architects who want to further their career at the company whose vision is to be recognised as one of the world’s greatest service companies.

The Solutions architecture team within Rackspace support customers by delivering the best technical solution to support their businesses. Working together with both our internal and external stakeholders, we create future-proof, multi-cloud solutions, that meet both business and technical objectives. We architect for innovation.

Day in the life of a Solution Architect at Rackspace

It may sound cliché, but at Rackspace you will find no two days are the same! With over 200,000 customers across a wide variety of verticals, your activities and engagements will be as numerous as they are varied! Here’s a quick diary from Mark, one of our Solution Architects, to give you a flavour of a typical week:

Monday starts with a meeting of the minds; huddles are a key way of catching up with my team, sharing challenges, ideating and discussing the upcoming week. I have a couple of hours until my customer call, so I spend it working on a new piece of wider contribution for the team; a design guide for the best way to architect Sitecore on Azure.

My customer call was pretty interesting, it’s an eCommerce customer who knows they want to transition to the cloud but have no idea where to start! I love these “Which cloud?” conversations, as it gives me the opportunity to really dig into their business and technical requirements and be opinionated about what’s the best decision for their organisation. We agree Google Cloud Platform is the right thing for them, so Tuesday is spent writing a new high-level design on GCP!

On Wednesday, I head out for a final design review meeting with one of my existing customers; we’re doing a presentation and Q&A with them on a VMware private cloud solution design. At the end of the session, the CTO confirms we’ve been successful in winning their business! Still buzzing from this morning, I return from the customer site and spend the last couple of hours of the day studying towards my AWS Solutions Architect exam.

Thursdays is when I have my regular 121 meeting with my manager, Steve, a Lead Solutions Architect who still works with customers day-to-day, architecting solutions. We discuss my career development plan and some upcoming training I am attending at Rackspace University, then he provides me with advice and guidance on how to deal with a particularly challenging customer.

Friday morning always starts the same way, “big breakfast” with my team, followed by “SA Training” – an opportunity for teams from across the business to teach us about the latest product innovations, or members of my team to share their knowledge. We find out about a new security solution we are launching to help protect customers’ data – I can’t wait to start telling customers about it next week!

Why Join Rackspace?

As a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud MSPs who’ve consistently featured in the top 100 best places to work, Rackspace is a destination employer. Depending on your experience and skill level as a Solution Architect you will have the opportunity to learn from and be mentored by a team of experienced architects as you grow and develop your career with the opportunity to explore many different career avenues. As a more experienced Solution Architect you will have many opportunities to further progress your career into enterprise or specialist architecture as well as into leadership roles. Regardless of level you will have the opportunity to both learn from and be mentored by colleagues from across the business and become a mentor to the less experienced Rackers yourself.

Key Skills and Values

Rackspace is looking for Solution Architects across a range of levels from different backgrounds and with various skills and expertise. Understanding that there are many paths to acquiring the skills needed to be a successful Solution Architect, we are seeking new Rackers who can demonstrate the below skills or those who are keen to gain them:

Personal Specifications

• Passion for problem solving and enthusiasm for positive customer outcomes
• Ability to communicate to technical and non-technical business stakeholders
• Keen learner who always strives to expand knowledge and skills
• Collaborative team player who also takes ownership and can depend on their own initiative

Knowledge, Experience, and Expertise

• Pre-sales experience, combining customer facing, commercial and technical capabilities
• Experience working with AWS, Azure, or the Google cloud platforms in either a pre-sales or engineering role with an interest in technical pre-sales
• Experience working with Public and Private Cloud platforms based on VMware, Microsoft, or OpenStack technology
• Presenting to a variety of audiences through use of various mediums such as whiteboarding, phone / video conference, stage, etc.
• You have experiences with leading customer workshops exploring the requirements and mapping solutions
• You have experience with developing winning themes and then writing technical responses to bids (RFP’s & RFI’s)
• Comfortable engaging at all levels of a customer’s business, from working with senior/C-level leadership to guiding IT-specialists and developers on building solutions
• Broad technical background and experience in a variety of technologies and services
• You have a good understanding of modern application landscapes and their dependencies on the infrastructure platform
• Fluent Business level German

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