Chief Architect

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This is an exciting Chief Architecture role at the heart of large-scale transformation. Through pragmatic IT architecture improvement, the Chief Architect will support the delivery of our future organisation. Delivering an improved customer experience is at the very heart of the agenda of our substantive IT enabled change and digital transformation programme. The Chief Architect will craft the technology vision and strategy to deliver this.

This is an exciting opportunity to join a new IT leadership team and enable a radical improvement in the agility, quality, and responsiveness of the systems landscape at the University of Leeds.

The Role

Define, own and deliver the future technology vision. Comprehensively capture the ‘as is' and set out the ‘to be', plus the technology roadmaps to move us towards a modern, efficient, user-centred and responsive systems landscape. Encourage consistency of approach and devise pragmatic architectural principles standards, governance, and controls.

Oversee and lead the delivery of architecture into all projects, programmes, as well as drive architecture improvement within operational services.

Lead and develop the IT architecture function. Create an architecture team which has the right structures, skillsets and culture to proactively shape an innovative future technology stack for a world class research focused university.

The Candidate

With a breadth of hands-on, business facing, architecture experience, you will have a proven track record of leading pragmatic and aligned technology architecture delivery and improvement.

With tenacity, energy, drive, and superb influencing skills, you should be proactive by nature and demonstrate a track record of formal and informal business stakeholder engagement. You should be able to articulate complex architecture issues to IT and business stakeholders in simple clear terms, relating IT architecture to measurable organisational outcomes.

An accomplished people leader you should understand good practice in IT architecture and be able to show teams how to adopt it. You will likely have a solid understanding of one of the architecture frameworks such as TOGAF or Zachman but be able to pragmatically apply them to the needs of your organisation.

The University, established in 1904, is one of the largest higher education institutions in the UK. We are renowned globally for the quality of our education and research. The strength of our academic expertise combined with the breadth of disciplines we cover, provides a wealth of opportunities, and has a real cultural, economic, societal, and environmental impact.

The University strives to achieve academic excellence within an ethical framework informed by our values of integrity, equality and inclusion, community, and professionalism. Leeds is truly a community, with more than 38,000 students from 170 different countries, over 9,000 staff of 100 different nationalities. Leeds is a member of the Russell Group of universities and is a top ten UK research institution. We are one of the UK's most prestigious and diverse universities.

Closing date for applications: midnight Sunday 3rd October 2021