Platform Architect at Coca-Cola Beverages South Africa

Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA) presents an exciting opportunity for an experienced Platform Architect, to join the Digital Consumer & Customer Platforms – IT  department, at CCBA. The successful applicant will be reporting into the Digital Lead – Commercial and Support.

Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA) is the largest African Coca-Cola bottler, accounting for 40% of all Coca-Cola volumes on the continent. CCBA has an extensive footprint in Africa, employing over 17 000 employees, serving a combined population of over 300 million people across the continent.

The CCBA vision is to refresh Africa every day and make the continent a better place for all, growing success as a business and creating a better-shared future for our people, customers, consumers, communities, planet, and shareholders. We conduct ourselves with the utmost integrity for shared value and the greater good. We are a world-class, customer-orientated, socially and environmentally conscious fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company that is driven by engaged, motivated, and inspired employees.

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Key Purpose:

• Responsible for leading, maintaining and leveraging the platform architecture across Digital Commerce (D2C, B2B and eMarketaplaces)
• Creates a roadmap & supports the definition of strategic direction for technologies that enables business-driven technology solutions. Assesses all available internal and external solutions to ensure that they are aligned with the strategic directions and fit for purpose, considering the development, customization, integration, and maintenance of the technology solutions.
• Work as part of Digital Commerce Agile Delivery Teams leading the technology roadmap in line with enhanced business capabilities delivered.
• Product Owner of tech-related Epics/Enablers within the Product Backlogs
• Work in very close collaboration with Product Owner, Product Manager, and Programme Manager on defining future Product Roadmap.
• Participating together with other IT Managers and Enterprise Architect on aligning on overall tech roadmap and architecture

The successful candidate may reside in any of the CCBA footprint of countries: South Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia & Zambia.

Key Duties & Responsibilities

• Able to promote successfully his/her vision about the platforms and technology roadmaps and get the necessary alignment and support from business stakeholders
• Able to lead the cross-functional alignment needed when big architectural decisions are made
• Provides leadership in the area of expertise to project personnel, particularly during design and implementation phases
• Persuasively communicate and promote to stakeholders (vendors, delivery) the importance and value of the Architecture application standards
• Regularly ask key stakeholders for feedback and take respective actions to address it
• Collaborate with business functions, design sub-function, vendors to understand business processes/functions/capabilities; determine direction and technologies to be used.
• Works closely with the design department, strategic business alignment manager, program management office, application development, and infrastructure design
• Assess all aspects of the application portfolio
• Contributes to the direction of initiatives (assist in creating the charter, plan); initiatives generally require operating within a designated architectural domain (i.e.business, solution, information, etc).
• Conduct development and analysis of alternative solutions; determine how solution fits in with the enterprise roadmaps and business plans; ensures the alignment of solutions with organizational strategies and needs and engages in risk assessment and mitigation.
• Recommend improvements to existing data, application, and infrastructure architectures in areas of expertise. Works with vendors and benchmarks to identify relevant innovation

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• Assist with RFP development and evaluation as needed
• Owns and updates regularly (at least yearly) the application roadmap for the applications the area of responsibility; aligns roadmaps with the business
• Ensures that roadmaps are tightly connected to Business Plan and demands to ensure their short-term and long-term relevancy
• Recommends and participates in activities related to the design, development and maintenance of the Solution/ Application Architecture
• Provides guidance, assistance and communication on architectural designs, definitions and guidelines to vendors, delivery and operational teams
• Ensures that solutions are consistent with the architectural direction for the project and the organization’s architectural landscape
• Defines Platforms Architecture processes and leads the integration of these processes with other related business and IT processes
• Be conversant across all architectural domains
• Understands business needs
• Provides high-level business-to-system mapping and complements the business requirements with all necessary non-functional requirements for the solutions as input for project work packages
• Provide and assess solution options. Find the right balance for a solution to meet the requirements and cost
• Provide architectural oversight to the implementation and review deliverables

Skills, Experience & Education

Qualifications:

The minimum qualification required for this position is Bachelor’s Degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Information Systems or equivalent

Experience:

• Min 10 years’ experience in IT, with 5 years of experience working as an Enterprise Architect or Solution Architect for a specific Product/Products within Digital Commerce domain (D2C, B2B, eMarketplaces, etc.)
• At least 2 years’ experience on architectural role within Product Organization
• FMCG industry-specific solutions knowledge and business processes in commercial area will be considered as strong advantage
• Experience with Adobe Commerce architecture design is required
• Experience working with MIRAKL (eMarketplaces solution) will be considered as advantage
• Strong understanding and experience in Agile Delivery Methodology.
• Good understanding on enterprise platform architecture designs. Experience with vendor RFP Process and Vendor selection process.
• Strong communication and influencing skills
• English proficiency