Contractor

VML is a leading creative company that combines brand experience, customer experience, and commerce to create connected brands and drive growth. VML is celebrated for its innovative and award-winning work for blue chip client partners including AstraZeneca, Colgate-Palmolive, Dell, Ford, Intel, Microsoft, Nestlé, The Coca-Cola Company, and Wendy's. The agency is recognized by the Forrester Wave™ Reports, which name WPP as a “Leader” in Commerce Services, Global Digital Experience Services, Global Marketing Services and, most recently, Marketing Measurement & Optimization. As the world’s most advanced and largest creative company, VML’s global network is powered by 30,000 talented people across 60-plus markets, with principal offices in Kansas City, New York, Detroit, London, São Paulo, Shanghai, Singapore, and Sydney.

AT VML Commerce & Technology:

Our commerce and technology division houses strategic consultants, creative and technical architects and skilled developers, testers, operators and many more that together help some of the world’s leading organisations to deliver outstanding digital experiences across all major routes to market worldwide: marketplaces, online retailers, D2C, B2B and social platforms. With over 4,200 experts in 55 operational centres across 34 countries, our capabilities span the entire buying journey from customer acquisition, through engagement, to conversion and loyalty, driving multi-channel growth for world-leading brands.

We work with some of the most exciting brands such as The Coca-Cola Company, EY, Bosch, Unilever, Ford, DFS, Mercedes-Benz, Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé, Sainsbury’s, Selfridges, Shell and Tiffany & Co.

We’ve built over 500 platforms for brands and retailers and generate in excess of $29bn annually for our clients and work with over 50 strategic partners including Adobe, SAP, Salesforce, HCL, Shopify, Sitecore, BigCommerce, commerce tools and Acquia.

Our reputation is based on our people, and we believe we have some of the best in the business.

As our business grows internationally, we’re looking for new people to join us on our journey to inspire and take a key role in shaping some of the best commerce solutions, services, and websites in the world. Working as a team, no problem is insurmountable; we share in our clients’ successes and believe that anyone can show creative bravery no matter what their role is in the team.

The opportunity:

Technical Architect required to work on an innovative platform project providing holistic AI solutions to our internal and external audiences. This is a complex and rewarding technical architecture role covering everything from IAM through to API design through to MDM. It will require significant core architecture experience and requires a level of pragmatism and consideration when making key design decisions, considering all the trade-offs, and being able to communicate direction and reasoning to our engineers and the with the wider senior stakeholders. The architecture role covers the application, integration, and data domains. You will need demonstrable experience of spearheading software architecture within fast-paced teams. You will need significant experience in designing for NFRs as well as functional requirements. As well as general software architecture skills, you will need specific experience with application and infrastructure architecture components in GCP, including serverless and containerised environments.

What you’ll be doing:

The successful candidate will be one of four technical architects responsible for the continued architecture and improvement of our platform. Your role will involve a large amount of technical architecture across the integration, application, and data model domains. You should be familiar with API design, data model design, designing for NFRs/quality attributes and making informed decisions about the architecture of the platform, considering all trade-offs and demonstrating reasoning for your decisions and directions.

This is not a role for someone who doesn’t also love development. Whilst we have a team of engineers, you should be from a hands-on development background, and still hold the ability to read and peer-review the code of others. You need to be a great communicator: the role will include direct interaction with our clients, who include both technical and non-technical colleagues.

We keep our knowledge relevant by continually looking for fresh technologies and innovative ideas, and sharing what we’ve learned with the team. As an architect you would be expected to exemplify this.

What we want from you:

• Experience and knowledge of common GCP serverless components and how these are assembled to provide robust, highly-available and performant solutions
• Significant experience in designing (and documenting) architectures and applications in GCP, handling a wide range of technical and non-technical constraints/NFRs/Quality Attributes
• Significant experience with making key design decisions/architecture decision records, considering all trade-offs, and communicating decisions with reasoning and justification to a wide range of stakeholders
• Significant experience in API design, documentation, and versioning, including the implementation of common GCP components
• Experience leading a development team from a design and technical ownerships perspective
• In-depth knowledge of application architecture in GCP, including an understanding of appropriate technologies and patterns for a given use case
• Experience with estimating large-scale architecture change, identifying key risks and dependencies, forming a priorities roadmap and informing a programme/project plan
• In-depth knowledge and experience with designing applications in a containerised environment
• Hands-on development experience, ideally in Python, and familiarity with complex enterprise software and it’s challenges
• Experience of designing software to run in a multi-tenant environment
• Experience with data model design, simplification and standardisation
• Experience within complex and highly-integrated architectures comprising of disparate and 3^rd party systems
• Written, spoken and diagrammatic communication skills, with the ability to convey technical and abstract principles
• Automation and quality-first mindset, including Infrastructure-as-Code languages (e.g. CloudFormation, Terraform) and advocating developer quality through unit testing, code reviews and automated tooling

If you know some of this, even better:

• C4 Model for Software Architecture
• Applying DevOps principles
• The application of AI (in the context of model abilities and use cases)
• Headless architectures, and how these interact with the BE
• Python, React, TypeScript, JavaScript, Java
• CI/CD pipeline creation and maintenance

• Diagrams-as-code