Lead Software Architect

Flutter is a FTSE 50 global leader in sports betting and gaming with annual revenues of over £4bn. Its strong and diverse portfolio of market-leading brands and best-in-class products provides its 13 million customers excitement and entertainment in a safe and responsible way. Flutter brands include Paddy Power, Sky Betting & Gaming, Betfair, Sportsbet, FanDuel, and PokerStars.

The Global Betting Platform (‘gbp’) is Flutter’s flagship proprietary sports betting platform and is being used by multiple Brands across the Group to power delivery of new Sports betting features at pace. Today the gbp product enables the generate of 33% of the total Flutter Group Sportsbook online revenue and has around 1.7m active customers across the multiple brands transacting on it.

The Role ...

The Lead Software Architect will lead a team of highly skilled software architects within an engineering delivery domain. The role will have line manager responsibility for colleagues within the team to whom you will provide tactical and strategic leadership, oversight and direction. You should have a solid technical and managerial background, proven problemsolving skills, be a strong technical and organizational leader with positive results-driven attitude and be able to demonstrate your ability to work in a fast-paced environment. Your team and you will be working as part of a multiple team, multiple location environment.

Working closely with the Product, Commercial and Technology teams, will lead the process of defining technical architecture and vision for its technical evolution. Will design simple solutions to complex business problems while assuring availability and performance. Will provide ongoing consultation and advice to stakeholders about roadmap features and will lead and implement architectural design best-practices. Will provide technical mentorship and support for architectural solution design to further evolve the gbp platform to become a truly world-class sports betting platform to power the Flutter Group to innovate and differentiate the experience we can provide to our customers across our multiple brands.

What you will be doing...

• Provide strategic technical direction and vision for the gbp Product architecture to enable a further resilient, scalable, re-usable, sharable and simpler product in order to support the demands of the evolving businesses and group.
• Be one of the active leaders on the technology-wide architecture community. • Work closely with Technology and Commercial stakeholders from multiple Flutter group divisions, to ensure the strategy and principles for technical solution design enables the betting platform to become a successful Flutter group asset.
• Lead, inspire, motivate and take people manager responsibility for the software architects within the team.
• Lead a software architecture team that participates in software design, code, test plan reviews and issue resolution as needed providing appropriate recommendations.
• Promote, lead and own the process of developing comprehensive, informative documentation of the gbp system to be used across the different Flutter divisions.
• Clearly communicate to group and divisions senior leadership and to your delivery function and respective squads. Be comfortable with conflict and effectively communicate trade-offs between conflicting demands across different teams, shortterm imperatives and long-term goals.
• Responsible for fostering an inner-source mindset
• Become versed in to the gbp product and provide consultation on its strengths, weaknesses, it’s systems relationships and dependencies.
• Assist senior leadership in analyzing project requirements and perform evaluation, conceptualization, design and integration of new features and enhancements
• Modeling (design patterns, domain driven design, micro architecture & SOA) • Component design (for example load, availability and reliability are a must at design stage, not afterthoughts).
• Develop a broad knowledge of the entire Technology ecosystem and business (not only the sports betting domain).
• Search, research and prototype new technologies to create a new application or improve existing applications.
• Coach, hold 1 to 1s, set and review objectives, appraise performance, and assist with career development, ensuring effective performance management.
• Help build a ‘delivery with high quality' culture that is accountability and results orientated.
• Identify, select, and develop top talent including and not shying away from talent that goes beyond your own capabilities.
• Work towards creation of an organisation that is an attractive place to work sustaining employee engagement.

What We're Looking For...

Expertise we hope you have:

• Proven track record of leading and managing software architecture teams.
• Able to project manage work for the team and prioritize effectively.
• Experience working with distributed, redundant, and transactional systems and the quality assurance of these.
• Strong analytical and diagnostic skills, particularly regarding technical risks, issues and constraints.
• Ability to properly balance the strategic and the tactical, ensuring the big-picture is not lost.
• Solid understanding of the software development life-cycle.
• Familiar with working in a Continuous Integration (or Delivery) environment.
• Familiar with working with Cloud Infrastructures.
• Proven track record of supporting Incident Management and respective resolution.
• Regularly brings new practices and opportunities to use technology in differentiating ways into his / her organization.
• Experienced in the usage of appropriate reusability techniques (design patterns, library extraction, new component creation) and mentoring team members towards cleaner more maintainable components
• Be an expert in your primary programming language, and be competent in others
• Experience in software architecture and design for highly available, modifiable applications with high throughput expectations

Competencies we hope you have

• Excellent English communication skills, both verbal and written
• Building Support: Capable of establishing close relationships with our stakeholders, underpinned by trust, integrity and respect. Able to build awareness, understanding and positive momentum behind the Group technology strategy, often without being in a position to assert authority
• Objective: Is impartial and unbiased, ensuring equal treatment for all and that decisions taken are based on objective criteria
• Collaboration: Work effectively and in partnership with our stakeholders on group shared goals that align towards the achievement of the Group technology strategy. Fosters a collaborative environment and assume the role of leader
• Adaptable: Understand and appreciate different and opposing perspectives on an issue and can adapt own approach in order to achieve a successful outcome.
• Strategic Thinking: Think about the big picture and use that perspective to support our Divisions to achieve competitive advantage through greater agility, faster time to market and a better customer experience.
• Strategic Communication: Proactive and considered in your approach to stakeholder communications. You actively listen, provide constructive feedback and help others to consider new perspectives.
• Leadership: provide innovative and strategic thinking to the function you lead to set clear outcomes for it to go after and set the right environment to allow it to flourish in attaining those outcomes