Job Description

What’s the role?

The Application Architect is accountable for the architecture of Trading & Supply (T&S) for the Oil/Products trading business. 

The Application Architect will work within an extended natural team to ensure that IT solutions for this segment have a high-quality architectural design with full consideration around ease of integration, risk exposure, compliance, ability to operate, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. The resulting roadmaps and high-level designs will have a measurable impact on the effectiveness and profitability of Shell.

This role ensures the business value of IT solutions is maximized by applying knowledge of the business needs and opportunities, the existing portfolio of IT applications, and the current and emerging technology and IT service capabilities.  The role supports and enables the development and execution of the strategy and plans for the IT Portfolio supporting the business.

The individual in this position will support the Lead Segment Architect and Business Lead Architect in the execution of architecture consultancy and assurance activities for the Line of Business.

Responsibilities of the role include managing relationships with key stakeholders including the business-facing IT Managers; business analysts; business process Owners; IT Engineering teams; Programme and Project managers and other Line of Business and Group Architects.  It also includes working closely with application development/deployment projects to assure and support them from an architecture perspective. The role includes overall accountability for managing the end-to-end lifecycle of applications in the portfolio from an IT architecture perspective.

The Application Architect is an integral member of the Business IT and the Shell Architecture IT teams, helping to shape the strategic direction of the portfolio from an architecture perspective.

Your day-to-day role includes the following activities:

Driving the architecture and supporting the natural teams within the business, by working with the Lead Application Architect to maintain the segment architectures, application portfolio inventory, landscape diagrams, and lifecycle maps for the applications within the portfolio.

Driving Solution or product selections against capabilities required within the business, including vendor selection and management.

Responsibility for the architectural standards and governance of projects within the segment to ensure the security, safety, and cost-effectiveness of all solutions deployed for the business by ensuring architecture artifact quality and retention in appropriate tools, for example, BizzDesign as well as facilitating Architecture Risk Assessments on projects, and conduct Assurance Reviews and Stage-Gate signoff for medium and low-risk projects, involving data, technical and integration architects as needed.

Maintain knowledge of compliance and regulatory requirements, including data privacy regulations (e.g. GDPR), and ensure that those are included in architecture strategy and design decisions. Proactively review segment portfolio with IT Managers and business to maintain the alignment on how personal data is managed and handled properly and lead natural teams towards increasing value and decreasing risk of data.

What we need from you?

Must have legal authorization to work in the US on a full-time basis for anyone other than current employer.

Bachelor's degree in an IT-related field

Minimum of 10 years of IT related experience is a must.

Good understanding of Trading Risk Management and Trading Operations .

Established experience in digital and IT with proven years of business-focused digital and some IT leadership experience. You have a proven track record of digital and IT architecture impact and success.

Stakeholder engagement is key to this role, in the broadest sense. Being sensitive to stakeholders, talking the right ‘language’ to specific target groups, and leading by example is crucial to the role. Being extremely curious about your own space, but also to the adjacent and outside world, and being able to translate that into actionable outcomes is another skill that need to be strongly present. You will actively influence the definition of the strategy and the planning of investments.

Crucially you will:

Know the TOGAF standards and understand the Shell Architecture Framework and be able to explain the role of architecture in IT processes/organisation 

Understand segment architecture and the link to portfolio management and platforms as well as the fundamentals of relevant architectures (process, data, application, integration) and be able to apply it effectively in support of the segment

Know the Target Operating Environment (TOE)

Know relevant Cyber Security and Data Privacy standards for Architecture and understand how to use the standards

Be curious about developments in IT solutions that will support and be relevant to the segment and be able to apply these in support of the business development agenda