Platform Architect - Conchango

Job Summary
Conchango is one of the UK's leading business and technology solution providers, and prides itself on the passion of its employees, the quality of its project work, and the calibre of its clients. Our clients include Virgin Atlantic, Lloyds of London, Vodafone, Debenhams, Marks and Spencer and Tesco. Conchango is the UK's leader in Agile development using the Scrum methodology and a Microsoft Gold Partner in 7 competencies.
We require an experienced Platform Architect to work as part of our Platform Architecture team that builds highly scalable, secure infrastructures to support our customers B2C and B2B applications.
The successful candidate will be responsible for liaising between the client, 3rd parties (for example hosting partners) and Conchango, advising on and architecting technical solutions, analysing requirements, developing specifications, producing technical designs, resource planning, risk management and small team management through to solution delivery and handover.
Duties and Responsibilities
Primarily this role will provide expert consultancy advice and management. Duties will include:
* Working as part of a project team to design the physical architecture of eBusiness solutions.
* Capacity planning and specifying the required system hardware and network connectivity.
* Assisting with identification of the physical architecture tasks and dependencies.
* Providing presales input for the physical architecture element of proposals and presentations.
* Identifying, documenting, and managing the technology architecture interdependencies and implications across multiple projects.
* Integration of physical and application architecture through close teamwork with the software architect and solution developers.
* Building and testing the development, staging (QA) and production environments.
* Establishing the automated procedures and processes for running, maintaining and deploying e-commerce applications.
* Taking responsibility for the security and robustness of the physical architecture.
* Building close working relationships with customer's hosting partners and other 3rd party suppliers.


Essential Qualifications and Experience
The ideal candidate will have commercial experience architecting and implementing large application architectures based on Microsoft .NET and/or Java based platforms.

The candidate is expected to have a broad knowledge of enterprise level infrastructure, platforms, middleware technologies, databases, application servers and the ability to quickly adapt to new technologies and changing environments.
Required Competencies
Required Skills
* Demonstrable design and configuration experience of e-business architectures across Microsoft .NET or Java based application server platforms.
* Experience of working with hosting providers in order to deliver e-business solutions, both B2B and B2C.
* Understanding of application deployment technology and management/operational processes.
* Knowledge of key internet technologies and protocols.
* Working knowledge of relational databases and their interaction with the underlying hardware.
Desirable Skills
* Application development or scripting experience in any language.
* Management/operations experience.
* Firewall policy design knowledge based on industry-standard Checkpoint FW-1 or Cisco PIX.
* Configuration experience of hardware load balancers (e.g. F5/Alteon/Cisco), Cisco routers, Checkpoint firewalls, etc.).
Required Competencies
* A passion for technology and a "can-do" attitude.
* Methodical.
* Take ownership and responsibility.
* Eye for detail and quality.
* Flexible.
* Self starter.
* Works well within a team.
* Must be able to manage own time successfully.
* Ability and willingness to learn new technologies on own initiative.
* Excellent listening and communication skills, at both a technical and non technical level.
* Willing to travel, primarily in the UK.