Aviva UK now has an opening for a Head of Platform Architecture to join and lead our established team. This role reports in to our Director of Operations and Transformations and is accountable for driving consistent forward-thinking architecture and engineering across the Aviva Technology Platform Estate (comprising of 686 applications across range of technologies).

This role is essential to providing IT leadership and transformational capabilities through implementation of leading technology and solutions. You will be expected to partner with the CIO and business leads to identify, develop and execute transformation capabilities to enhance commercial and service objectives and provide world class IT and operational capabilities.

We believe this to be a great role because of the scale of influence it would have within Aviva following the business’s strong investment in digitisation as we modernise our platform estate. Aviva now uses “smart-working”, and the person in this role can be based across the UK, as long as they are comfortable regularly travelling to our offices.

The role’s duties & responsibilities

The main aspect of this position is to lead our architecture and design team (circa 25 FTE) to set technical roadmaps and deliver the IT strategy across Technology Platforms. This includes our freshly supported focus on Cloud First, Container, Serverless strategy and Customer centric architecture. Additional responsibilities include:

• Defining and executing the platform strategy (including technical and functional roadmaps to drive re-use, standardisation and remediation of technical debt)

• Planning and delivering platform-level resourcing, capacity planning and costs consistent with Group CIO commitments and targets

• Identifying opportunities to innovate and drive implementation across the broader platform team

• Owning Platform compliance with IT and Business Standards

• Accountable for platform strategy/design/services, innovation & change delivery, governance, functional leadership, and risk/controls for the Platform Architecture team

Skills & experiences required:

• Significant previous experience of technically managing sophisticated IT architecture deliveries

• Background of transformation experience and leadership on a large scale, including delivering efficiency and cost transformation

• Robust commercial experience with modern engineering techniques (DevOps, Containers, Serverless, Cloud, etc.)

• Track record of working through differing methodologies - including LEAN, Agile and Waterfall approaches

• Proven experience with crafting strategy, mobilization, putting customers first, inspiring & influencing, building talent and teams

• A strong desire to lead innovation, seeking to disrupt/challenge and drive new modern software development techniques

What will you get for this role?

• A competitive salary depending on location, skills, experience and qualifications

• Generous defined contribution pension scheme

• Annual performance related bonus and pay review

• Holiday allowance of 29 days plus bank holidays and the option to buy/sell up to 5 additional days

• Up to 40% discount for some Aviva products through “My Aviva Extras” plus discounts for Friends and Family (some exclusions apply)

• Excellent range of flexible benefits to include a matching share save scheme

Working at Aviva

At Aviva, we’re people with a purpose. To be with you today, for a better tomorrow.

We bring this to life by ensuring managing risk is at the heart of the way we all work. We love people who do the right thing for our customers, and our colleagues. We want people who speak up, who take ownership, and who make good decisions.

The way we do this is important too, we’re all about our people – that’s you – so we can be pretty flexible. If you want to work from home some of the time or change your hours so you can pick up your kids or care for someone in your family, we’re very open to that. In fact, we don’t advertise roles as either part or full time, because we know each person has different needs, just as each business area has different needs. So, it’s up to you to discuss working hours during your interview.

We care deeply about being inclusive and that means we encourage applications from people with diverse backgrounds and experiences. We want our employees to bring their whole self to work and that starts with you.

We interview every disabled applicant* that meets the minimum criteria for the job. Once you’ve applied, please send us a separate email stating that you have a disclosed disability and we’ll make sure we interview you.

We’d love it if you could submit your application online. If you require an alternative method of applying, please give Daniel Hopchet a call on 0121 234 7625 or send an email to Daniel.Hopchet@Aviva.com.

*As defined in The Equality Act 2010*. By ‘minimum criteria’ we mean you should provide us with evidence which demonstrates that you generally meet the level of competence required and have the qualifications, skills or experience defined as essential to perform the role.