British Veterinary Association
Job Title: Enterprise Architect

Location: United Kingdom (UK) – Significant scope for working from anywhere.

Company: CVS UK Ltd.

About Us:

CVS is a leading veterinary healthcare company based in the United Kingdom, dedicated to providing high quality veterinary care across multiple facets of the business including veterinary hospitals, laboratories, crematoria and pet health eCommerce. CVS has considerable coverage across the UK and has a growing presence in The Netherlands, Republic of Ireland and Australia. We deliver success through our people and aim to provide our colleagues with a well-supported, secure and future fit technology estate, so they can focus on delivering the best clinical care.

The role:

CVS is looking for someone to take our business vision & objectives and develop and own an enterprise technology strategy to best meet those goals.

This is a green-field role, presenting an opportunity for the right candidate to establish an architecture function from the ground up in what is a diverse and genuinely interesting industry that puts doing the right thing for patients and owners first.

We are looking for motivated candidates who bring experience, new ideas and most importantly positive energy to designing and delivering systems in a dynamic and varied industry. No two days present the same challenges and so a successful candidate will be ready to apply themselves to new domains and technologies at any time.

While this role is absolutely operating at an enterprise strategy level, at CVS we believe that successful Enterprise architecture has its foundations in practical solutions architecture & delivery. A successful candidate will be able to engage at a practical level with business stakeholders, engineers and solution architects on specific practical challenges, but also be able to own and articulate a higher-level enterprise architecture strategy under which specific solutions are executed.

Core responsibilities :

• Collaboration with senior management to develop and implement a strategy and high-level roadmap aligned with the overall business objectives of CVS.
• To work with the wider engineering community at CVS and contribute to exploring and defining architectural principles and strategic direction.
• Supply hands-on architecture expertise to project teams, applying those principles to shaping conceptual, logical and physical IT solutions for projects.
• To work with the BA community, consulting with business users to help them articulate their requirements in a technology agnostic manner and to distil each requirement down to its root. E.g. The production of a transaction report is not a root business requirement. The ability to reconcile transactions and act on outliers is the root requirement.
• To ensure that appropriate levels of concise documentation are created and maintained for solution designs.
• To define a process for designs to be presented to the wider IT communities for review, iteration and ultimately approval.
• Identify and mitigate technology-related risks. Engage in the development and maintenance of disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
• To work with the Security & Compliance functions to ensure security, resilience and compliance are appropriately factored in solution designs.
• Work with software & hardware vendors to understand and/or influence the direction of their products in order to better inform CVS’s architectural approach.
• Conduct feasibility studies for domain specific new technologies.
• Understanding business requirements in order to identify where changes in business process or requirements scope may be a lower cost alternative to a technical solution.
• To recognise opportunities to deploy technology to business processes as they present themselves and initiate the investigation and development of innovative methods of exploiting IT assets to the benefit of CVS’s customers and internal users.

Required experience & capabilities:

• A strategic thinker with the ability to balance long-term vision with practical implementation.
• Demonstrable depth of knowledge and hands on practical experience in one or more architectural domains. E.g.
  • Infrastructure (solid cloud and devops experience mandatory in this field)
  • Retail or other ‘field’ operations (POS systems included)
  • Supply chain
  • End-user computing/workspace
  • E-commerce
  • Business Intelligence
  • Data science
  • etc
• Demonstrable capacity to apply oneself to architectural challenges outside of ones’ typical area of specialism when required.
• Demonstrable soft-skills & comfort engaging with engineers as well as C-suite level stakeholders. The ability to summarise & articulate nuanced and technical topics to non-technical decision makers.
• Sound understanding of cloud services as to be able to assess their suitability for applying to solution designs.
• Demonstrable understanding of data modelling backed by experience of relational and/or NoSQL databases.
• Experience working in an agile environment.

Desirable experience:

• Familiarity with the veterinary or human medicine industry.
• AWS/Azure/GCP architecture certifications.
• Engineering/coding background.
• Familiarity with Microsoft enterprise suite(s) – Active Directory on-prem as well as M365.
• Experience of a business operating in many physical locations e.g. Retail stores.
• Familiarity with systems administration.