Information Technology Solution Architect

The Senior Manager, Information Technology Solution Architect

The Senior Manager, Information Technology Solution Architect is responsible for defining, governing, and evolving the organization’s IT architecture, technology strategy, cybersecurity capability, security risk and compliance alignment, design governance, project delivery assurance, operational resilience, and lifecycle management. The role provides senior technology leadership across enterprise platforms, infrastructure, cloud services, cybersecurity, integration, data, applications, operations, and technology operating models, ensuring that technology investments are secure, scalable, resilient, supportable, cost-effective, and aligned with business priorities, enterprise architecture principles, and long-term organizational strategy.

This role provides senior leadership across IT architecture, cybersecurity, security risk and compliance, design governance, project delivery, operational resilience, and lifecycle management. It is accountable for translating business strategy into secure, scalable, supportable, and cost-effective technology direction while ensuring architecture decisions are governed, risk-informed, operationally ready, and aligned with long-term organizational priorities.

IT Architecture and Strategy

• Define and maintain the enterprise IT architecture strategy, including current-state assessment, target-state architecture, transition architectures, roadmaps, and implementation priorities.
• Translate business strategy, growth plans, operational requirements, risk appetite, and investment priorities into practical technology direction and architecture decisions.
• Develop and govern IT architecture blueprints across infrastructure, cloud, platforms, applications, data, integration, identity, workplace technology, cybersecurity, and operational technology interfaces where applicable.
• Establish architecture principles, standards, reference models, decision frameworks, and reusable solution patterns to guide consistent technology delivery.
• Align technology investment portfolios with target-state architecture, lifecycle management requirements, technical debt reduction, service resilience, and business value outcomes.
• Lead technology strategy planning activities, including capability assessments, gap analysis, options analysis, cost-benefit evaluation, risk assessment, sequencing, and transformation roadmap development.
• Provide architectural input into ICT strategy, digital transformation, cloud strategy, data centre strategy, cybersecurity strategy, sourcing strategy, and technology operating model design.
• Monitor industry trends, emerging technologies, vendor roadmaps, and regulatory expectations to inform future architecture direction and strategic technology choices.
• Support governance of architecture exceptions, technology standards, solution approvals, investment proposals, and strategic change initiatives.

Security Risk and Compliance

• Lead alignment of technology architecture and solution designs with information security policies, enterprise risk appetite, regulatory obligations, and internal control requirements.
• Embed governance, risk, and compliance considerations into architecture decision-making, solution approvals, technology roadmaps, and investment recommendations.
• Support the definition and maintenance of security control frameworks, risk taxonomies, control ownership models, control baselines, and compliance evidence requirements.
• Assess technology and cybersecurity risks associated with new initiatives, legacy platforms, third-party services, cloud adoption, data flows, integrations, and operational resilience dependencies.
• Partner with risk, compliance, internal audit, cybersecurity, legal, procurement, and business stakeholders to ensure technology solutions meet applicable standards, contractual requirements, and regulatory expectations.
• Oversee architecture-related security exceptions, risk acceptances, compensating controls, remediation plans, and management reporting.
• Contribute to audit readiness by ensuring architecture artefacts, design decisions, security controls, risk assessments, and compliance evidence are complete, traceable, and current.
• Promote continuous improvement in security governance, compliance maturity, control effectiveness, risk reporting, and assurance practices.

Design Governance and Project Delivery

• Establish and operate design governance processes across the project lifecycle, including architecture intake, design review, solution approval, stage-gate assurance, implementation readiness, and operational handover.
• Chair or contribute to architecture review boards, design authorities, technical design forums, project steering groups, and delivery governance forums to ensure solutions remain aligned with approved architecture and business outcomes.
• Provide architectural leadership to projects from initiation through discovery, design, build, test, transition, go-live, and post-implementation review.
• Ensure project designs include clear functional and non-functional requirements, integration patterns, security controls, data flows, infrastructure dependencies, operational support models, resilience requirements, and acceptance criteria.
• Review solution designs, high-level designs, detailed designs, technical specifications, vendor proposals, test strategies, migration plans, cutover plans, and operational readiness artefacts.
• Partner with project managers, business analysts, engineers, cybersecurity, operations, vendors, and managed service providers to resolve design issues, delivery risks, technical dependencies, and implementation blockers.
• Monitor delivery alignment against approved architecture decisions, design principles, scope, risk profile, budget assumptions, and implementation milestones.
• Support project delivery assurance by identifying architecture risks, technical debt, compliance gaps, design deviations, and remediation actions before solutions progress to production.
• Ensure completed solutions transition effectively into operations with appropriate documentation, support processes, monitoring, service ownership, and lifecycle management arrangements.

Operations, Resilience and Lifecycle Management

• Ensure architecture decisions support stable, secure, reliable, and cost-effective IT operations across infrastructure, cloud, applications, networks, identity, data platforms, and end-user technology.
• Embed operational requirements into solution design, including monitoring, alerting, logging, capacity, performance, backup, recovery, support models, service ownership, runbooks, and operational acceptance criteria.
• Define and govern resilience requirements including high availability, disaster recovery, business continuity, recovery time objectives, recovery point objectives, failover patterns, dependency mapping, and recovery testing.
• Identify single points of failure, operational bottlenecks, supportability gaps, technical debt, obsolete platforms, and lifecycle risks that may affect service reliability or business continuity.
• Partner with IT operations, service management, cybersecurity, engineering, application teams, vendors, and managed service providers to improve service resilience, operational readiness, maintainability, and incident recovery.
• Support technology lifecycle planning across hardware, software, platforms, cloud services, integrations, certificates, licences, support contracts, and vendor roadmaps.
• Develop lifecycle roadmaps and remediation plans for ageing assets, unsupported technologies, technical debt, capacity constraints, resilience gaps, and end-of-life or end-of-support risks.
• Ensure operational lessons learned from incidents, outages, problem management, service reviews, audits, and resilience testing are translated into architecture improvements and roadmap priorities.
• Promote continuous improvement in operational resilience, service reliability, automation, observability, standardization, and lifecycle governance.

Senior Stakeholder Engagement and Leadership

• Act as a senior technology advisor to executive leaders, business owners, project sponsors, and governance forums on architecture direction, investment priorities, technology risk, and transformation trade-offs.
• Build and maintain trusted relationships with senior stakeholders across business, technology, cybersecurity, operations, risk, compliance, finance, procurement, legal, vendors, and delivery partners.
• Translate complex technical, cybersecurity, operational, and architectural matters into clear executive-level narratives, recommendations, decision papers, and governance submissions.
• Influence strategic decisions by presenting options, risks, benefits, constraints, dependencies, costs, and implementation considerations in a balanced and commercially aware manner.
• Lead cross-functional teams, architecture communities, working groups, and delivery stakeholders to build consensus around target-state architecture, standards, priorities, and execution plans.
• Facilitate senior workshops, design forums, steering committee discussions, and executive briefings to resolve competing priorities, unblock decisions, and maintain delivery momentum.
• Manage stakeholder expectations during complex change, ensuring architecture decisions are transparent, well documented, and aligned with business value, risk appetite, and operational readiness.
• Mentor and coach architects, engineers, analysts, and project teams to strengthen technical capability, leadership maturity, collaborative behaviours, and disciplined delivery practices.
• Represent ICT leadership in enterprise governance forums, vendor discussions, assurance reviews, and strategic planning activities.

IT Cybersecurity Capabilities

• Define and maintain cybersecurity architecture principles, standards, patterns, and control baselines across enterprise, cloud, network, endpoint, identity, application, and data environments.
• Lead threat modelling, security architecture reviews, and risk assessments for new systems, major changes, third-party integrations, and technology transformation initiatives.
• Design and govern security controls aligned with defence-in-depth, zero trust, least privilege, secure-by-design, and resilience-by-design principles.
• Oversee security requirements for identity and access management, privileged access management, network segmentation, secure remote access, vulnerability management, encryption, logging, monitoring, and data protection.
• Ensure technology solutions support cyber threat detection, incident response, disaster recovery, business continuity, and recovery from cyber events.
• Partner with cyber security, risk, compliance, infrastructure, application, and operations teams to ensure architecture decisions reduce cyber risk and meet regulatory, contractual, and internal policy obligations.
• Assess emerging cyber threats, technology vulnerabilities, and evolving attacker techniques, translating findings into practical architecture improvements and remediation priorities.
• Support security assurance activities including design sign-off, control validation, exception management, audit preparation, and remediation tracking.

Experience, skills and competencies

• Enterprise and solution architecture development
• IT strategy development, target-state architecture definition, capability modelling, roadmap planning, and portfolio alignment
• Cloud architecture, hybrid infrastructure, and platform modernization
• Network, identity, endpoint, and data centre architecture
• Cybersecurity architecture, threat modelling, security-by-design, risk management, control design, and cyber resilience
• Identity and access management, privileged access management, network segmentation, secure remote access, encryption, logging, monitoring, and vulnerability management
• Security governance, risk and compliance, control frameworks, audit readiness, security exceptions, risk acceptance, and remediation governance
• Application integration, APIs, data flows, and interoperability
• Technology lifecycle management, technical debt reduction, and service resilience
• Operational resilience, disaster recovery, business continuity, observability, service reliability, operational readiness, and support model design
• Architecture governance, design assurance, and technical documentation
• Design governance, project delivery assurance, stage-gate reviews, solution design sign-off, implementation readiness, and operational handover
• Vendor evaluation, technology selection, and commercial awareness

Desirable qualifications / professional certification (if applicable)

• Bachelor’s degree in information technology, Computer Science, Engineering, Cybersecurity, or a related discipline; postgraduate qualifications are desirable.
• Extensive experience in enterprise architecture, solution architecture, infrastructure architecture, cloud architecture, security architecture, or a comparable senior technology leadership role.
• Demonstrated experience leading architecture for complex enterprise environments, including cloud platforms, networks, data centres, applications, identity, integration, and cybersecurity controls.
• Strong understanding of architecture frameworks, security governance, risk, and compliance practices such as TOGAF, ITIL, COBIT, ISO/IEC 27001, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, CIS Controls, Zero Trust Architecture, or equivalent industry frameworks.
• Experience developing technology strategies, roadmaps, standards, architecture principles, design patterns, and migration plans.
• Experience designing IT operating models, architecture governance practices, technology lifecycle frameworks, enterprise roadmaps, and investment prioritisation approaches.
• Demonstrated experience supporting complex project delivery, including design governance, architecture assurance, solution review, technical dependency management, implementation planning, and operational transition.
• Demonstrated experience with IT operations, service management, operational resilience, disaster recovery, business continuity, technical debt reduction, and technology lifecycle planning.
• Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders, manage ambiguity, and communicate complex technical concepts in clear business language.
• Demonstrated capability in senior stakeholder engagement, executive communication, governance facilitation, conflict resolution, negotiation, and cross-functional leadership.
• Experience working with vendors, managed service providers, system integrators, and technology partners.
• Relevant certifications such as TOGAF, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, CISSP, CISM, ITIL, SABSA, or equivalent are highly regarded.