Solution Architect

In this role as Solution Architect, you will be responsible for translating business and tech requirements into architecture blueprints. You will also conduct thorough analysis of existing solutions, identify gaps, and recommend improvements. To deliver in this role you will have to evaluate the architecture holistically, use deep technical expertise to understand the business impact of technical components, and give recommendations and guidelines for teams implementing solutions.

This is a unique opportunity to join team of Solution Architects working on cutting edge retail solutions within our company within several different areas from product creation, through logistics, to sales in store or online. You will also be contributing to strength the Architecture Community by developing standards and guidelines.

In this specific role (either based in Bangalore or Stockholm depending on the candidate location), you will be assigned to work with our Design and Create component area. The area’s purpose is to “transform how we operate through industry leading capabilities for fashion design and product development - people, process, data and tech - we enable H&M to liberate fashion for the many.”

You will be responsible for the solution landscape supporting the creative product creation processes at H&M, covering company crucial and quickly transforming areas such as PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) and other initiatives under Design and Create area. The tech landscape consists of both in-house developed solutions as well as third party bought software, which all needs to be stitched together in a well-functioning landscape.

Responsibilities:

• Contextualize strategic vision and direction; conduct analysis, identify opportunities, constraints and support strategic activities throughout Centric PLM implementation and surrounding processes.
• Drive the data strategy as per enterprise guidelines to make PLM data available for downstream applications.
• Responsible for designing and validating end-to-end business and data flow due to new solutions/changes to existing solutions in the PLM / Design & Create area.
• Provide guidance on integration layer architecture including the API exposure for internal/external applications.
• Support and bridge stakeholders' understanding of business and technology implication of future direction.
• Provide guidance and coaching to advise on options, risks, costs vs. benefits, impact, priorities, etc.
• Translate business needs and technical requirements into architectural blueprints; documenting all solution architecture analysis and design.
• Identify interdependencies and use ‘holistic thinking’ to ensure the cross-team and cross-initiative perspective – also incorporate broader aspects such as overall product costs/revenue, data privacy & sovereignty, business continuity, information security etc.
• Analyze, design, develop, maintain and communicate solution roadmaps and transition architectures.
• Create architectural designs to contextualize solution(s) development, provide leadership and collaborate with teams to ensure the products/solutions are aligned with business and IT goals including the overall enterprise architecture – e.g. relevant technology strategies, policies, standards and practices are applied.
• Evaluate and drive continuous improvement, reducing technical debt and enhancing end-to-end business value.
• Participate in internal and external activities related to technology matching and selection to ensure technology choice aligns with overall tech architecture, standards and business strategy etc.
• Facilitate best practice sharing and teach architecture thinking to engineering and delivery community.

Requirements

Qualifications

• You can see the big picture, identify patterns and instinctively know how to win support for your ideas.
• You should have at-least 2-3 end-to-end PLM Implementation experience in Retail industry as Tech Lead / Solution Architect.
• You can understand and visualize concepts that are not yet concrete, and use your problem-solving skills, strong analytic ability, creativity and customer and business drive to find a solution.
• You take the initiative and are not afraid to take the first steps to identify and address existing and potential obstacles, issues and opportunities.
• You show commitment and ownership and demonstrate attention to detail and accuracy, architectural governance and standards.
• You are open to change and humble about not always knowing everything, so you ask.
• You are an effective team player that can express technical concepts, ideas, feelings, opinions, and conclusions to peers and people with an only limited technical background and contribute positively to your team environment.
• While being a specialist in a particular area of our architecture, you also have a width across a specific set of disciplines within the domain.

Nice to have

• 5+ years of experience in building complex solutions.
• Experience in working with Jira and Confluence.
• Ability to create both high-level and low-level design documentation and technical specification.
• Experience from retail assortment planning, product creation/development, sourcing and procurement.
• Deep experience from .Net/Azure tech stack and/or GCP/Python tech stack.
• Experience from digital product creation, including 3D software, DAM, rendering pipelines etc.
• Experience from working in a product organization in a large scale agile set-up
• Experience from Azure/GCP solutions
• Experience from AI and Data architecture/solutions