Director of Architecture London, England
Job description
Your Team: We are Technology: a department that has people and product at its heart. We use technology to innovate and lead the global conversation on the future of journalism and storytelling. We recently won Team of the Year at the UK Business and Innovation Awards 2023 and proudly are part of TechCharterUK as over 27% of our Tech roles are filled by gender minorities.
Your Role: You will be responsible for ensuring the alignment of the objectives and architectural decisions made across digital teams with the technology and engineering strategies established by the senior leadership team across the digital technology estate within the organisation.
Managing the software architecture discipline and teams across the digital technology estate
Facilitate the establishment of best practices associated with the design and implementation of end to end systems
Develop and maintain architectural blueprints and reference architectures that support the company's business objectives.
Provide architectural direction to the business and digital technology teams
Maintain and cultivate a centralised knowledge repository of information from a wide range of sources and content types and make this information widely available
Manage the team associated with providing insights and direction pertaining to our capabilities across platforms and product teams
Be forward looking at industry trends, emerging technologies and best practices in order to ensure industry relevance across both media and technology
Help to facilitate the design and implementation of information and data structures such as metadata
Develop and maintain an enterprise-wide technology roadmap that aligns with the company's strategic goals.
Ensure that technology solutions are cost-effective, scalable, and easy to use.
Work with the technology team to design and implement technology solutions that meet business needs.
Ensure that technology solutions are compliant with applicable regulations and standards.
Chair the Architecture Design Authority (ADA) to review significant initiatives and design changes.
Specify and maintain the Request for Comment (RFC) process providing clear guidance to teams and individuals on the tools, processes, standards and strategies they should use and follow when developing our digital products.
What we are looking for from you:
You should be passionate about software engineering & architecture as well as the culture needed to truly practice it. You should want to nurture and develop talent and teams as well as the communities both internal and external (open source) needed to truly build world class engineering organisations.
Recent and relevant software engineering experience (basically building amazing things)
Recent and relevant experience in helping to deliver architectural initiatives aimed at driving revenue and improving efficiencies in line with business strategy
Building high performing teams and culture, including coaching and mentoring
Working with world class consumer products across various platforms
Building highly scalable and high traffic products
Making key technical, delivery and strategic decisions
Working with partners in the PaaS and SaaS spaces to leverage the best of commoditized services
Building enterprise systems
Working with open source projects and the communities that underpin them
Working with and establishing truly cross functional teams to aid in product development
Experience in technical architecture, with a focus on simplifying technology ecosystems.
Proven track record of developing and implementing technology solutions that are effective, efficient, and scalable.
Good understanding of the Cyber Security space including knowledge of the Cyber Defense products and services.
We are News UK: One of the leading media businesses in the UK and Ireland, our newsbrands include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Sun on Sunday and The TLS. Our national broadcast brands include talkSPORT, Times Radio, talkRADIO and Virgin Radio UK, and we have market-leading local radio stations across Ireland. In 2022 we launched TalkTV, a major new TV channel available to everyone across the UK, delivering a schedule of news, current affairs, entertainment and sport, with Piers Morgan in a primetime evening show. Our world-famous brands provide news, analysis, opinion and entertainment to almost 40 million people each month. Spanning digital and print, audio and video, events and experiences, our brands are home to a plurality of opinion, representing the diverse communities we serve. News UK is wholly owned by News Corp.
Life at News: At News UK our people are our heartbeat - they are the driving force behind our brands and we want to enable people to thrive. Some of us work flexibly, in many different ways. We encourage you to talk to us about the flexibility you would like. Many of us work in a hybrid way between one of the News UK & Ireland offices and remotely.
We champion diversity and inclusion, we strive to maximise and encourage every individual’s potential and ensure everyone feels valued. We support this through our Diversity Board, D&I strategy & training, creating more diverse content and our intern and apprenticeship programmes. We also have 11 employee-led networks.
We take pride in looking after our amazing talent at News UK supporting the Health and Wellbeing of our staff. Some of what we offer includes:
A generous pension scheme with employer contributions of up to 5%;
25 days holiday and up to 4 volunteering days per year;
Maternity leave up to 18 weeks full basic salary & paternity leave up to 2 weeks;
Wide range of training available, plus full LinkedIn Learning access.
Private medical insurance covering pre-existing conditions
Discounted gym memberships, ClassPass at Home, weekly virtual HIIT, yoga and run club classes
‘Bikes for Work’ scheme
Access to wellbeing benefits such as physio/massage and counselling
We want to ensure that everyone we meet has the opportunity to perform to their best when interviewing. Please let us know, at any stage, whether you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, and we will do our best to accommodate.
News UK is an official partner of the Journalism Diversity Fund, founder of the Journalism and Disability Forum, and proud member of the Valuable 500. At News UK, we will continue to promote an inclusive and diverse workplace, to help people with visible and non visible disabilities create careers in media and aim to make our content accessible to all.
