PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT

The City of Toronto is the fourth largest city in North America and the fourth largest government in Canada, with a highly diverse and multicultural population. In addition, the City of Toronto has several agencies and corporations including the Toronto Police Service, Toronto Public Library, and the Toronto Transit Commission, which make up the broader municipal organization.

Consistently ranked one of the world's most livable cities, Toronto is home to more than 2.9 million people whose diversity and experiences make this great city Canada's leading economic engine and one of the world's most diverse and livable cities.

Toronto is a global leader in technology, finance, film, music, culture, and innovation, and consistently places at the top of international rankings due to investments championed by its government, residents, and businesses.

In its pursuit of modernizing City services through strategic investment, digital transformation, and a culture of innovation, the Technology Services Division collaborates with all City Divisions, agencies, boards, and corporations to deliver client centric business solutions and secure, reliable IT infrastructure.

Embarking on a transformative journey, the Technology Services Division is reshaping its culture and service delivery approach, focusing on four key priorities:

1. Build Resilient Foundations: Establish a robust, reliable, and secure technology infrastructure.

2. Deliver User-Centric Solutions: Provide enterprise-grade modern solutions with a focus on user experience.

3. Harness Data Power: Utilize data to drive operational processes and informed decision­ making Citywide.

4. Empower Stakeholders: Engage and empower stakeholders to foster a culture of agility and innovation.

In this pivotal, strategically important role of a Principal Architect with the City of Toronto Technology Services Division, you will play an instrumental part in City's technology and digital transformation. You will define, realize, and leverage current and future technology to enable the City's technology vision, building on existing system investments to ensure stable, sustainable and scalable technology solutions. Working closely with peers, stakeholders and vendors, you will provide subject matter expertise and leadership in the network domain in the design, analysis, development, and transformation of the platforms or solutions as well as technology standards implementation.

As principal architect, you will report to Director, Architecture and Standards, and will be part of Technology Services Division’s Architecture team providing leadership in the Enterprise Architecture area. 

This key role will initially focus on strategy, planning (short and long range), architecting of City’s service management and customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities and technology platforms, with a forward-looking approach to meet evolving business needs throughout the city. 

As Principal Architect, you'll also provide oversight on solution analysis, formulation, coordination as well as advising leadership and teams on programs and services at both strategic and operational levels. You will provide innovative, resourceful architectural direction, identifying approaches, concepts, and methods of analyzing complex and sometimes competing priorities.

You will provide hands-on experience in the areas of:

• Manage, motivate and train assigned staff (including supervision of the day to day operation), ensuring effective teamwork, high standards of work quality and organizational performance, continuous learning and encourages innovation in others.
  
  
• Provides direction, leadership and guidance to project teams, assigned project staff and contract resources.
  
  
• Develops, recommends and administers the annual budget for the unit, and ensures that the unit's expenditures are controlled and maintained within approved budget limitations.
  
  
• Conducts Extensive research into assigned area ensuring that research takes into account developments within the field, industry best practices, corporate policies and practices, legislation and initiatives by other levels of government.
  
  
• Develops the Enterprise Architecture (EA) program for network for the city and its ongoing evolution of support services for the technology and business communities by building on existing system investments to ensure Technology Services provides stable, sustainable, and scalable solutions.
  
• Develops and refines the city's EA while ensuring that the business requirements of the city as a whole, individual division/programs and the Agencies, Boards and Commissions are considered.
  
  
• Leads the analysis of the current network technology environment to detect critical deficiencies and technical debt and recommend solutions for improvement.
  
  
• Drives digital innovation by leveraging innovative new technologies and approaches to renovate, extend, and transform the existing core technology base.
  
• Builds an enterprise architecture community of practice by fostering a strong working relationship among the roles of Principal Architect, enterprise architects, domain architects, solution architects and other architect practitioners.
  
  
• Provides subject matter expertise, oversight, and direction for the development and establishment of Enterprise Architectures for Information, Applications and Infrastructure. 
  
  
• Analyzes existing enterprise business context to derive future state technology architecture. 
  
  
• Provides solutions to meet business requirements, ensuring compliance with the technology strategy, company policies and procedures.
  
  
• Provides architectural support for application development and modification activities. Assists in design, development, integration and implementation activities. 
  
  
• Defines requirements, principles and models that guide technology decisions for the enterprise.
  
  
• Works with team members to develop architectural strategies and guidelines. 
  
  
• Collaborates with Technology Services teams and recommends new technologies to management to develop robust solutions and reviews and recommends improvements to existing solution architectures.
  
  
• Analyzes and troubleshoots architecture related issues in a timely fashion.
  
  
• Provides oversight, expertise and direction in the mapping and monitoring of technologies underlying business capabilities, as well as emerging new uses and standards.
  
  
• Provides oversight, expertise and direction for the development of Technology standards, the exploration of technologies for service innovation and business support and the establishment of strategies to implement an enterprise architecture model.
  
  
• Participates in project life cycle for: the preparation and development of high level/detailed technical requirements, planning and scheduling, managing and mitigating technical issues and risks, contribution to feasibility and cost/benefit analysis of business solutions.
  
  
• Leads, participates in or oversees the preparation of various formal contractual documents such as: Request for Expression of Interest, Request for Information/Proposal/Quotation/Resource, ITAPP, Statement of Work, Memorandum of Understanding and Service Level Agreement. 
  
  
• Deals with confidential information affecting the organization and its resources. Prepares and presents reports to management supporting recommendations on changes/improvements in business processes, training and services, standards that impact appropriate staffing levels and resource allocation.
  
  
• Participates in the development, implementation, administration, monitoring and maintenance of enterprise architecture, collecting confidential information on infrastructure and application gaps. 
  
  
• Provides leadership to the Architecture Review Boards and ensures that architecture and related quality assurance processes are communicated, understood and implemented enterprise wide.
  
  
• Refines the EA based on the results of the annual assessments and ongoing contact with all sections in the Technology Services Division and divisional technology groups to ensure that all aligned with enterprise technology capabilities.
  
  
• Defines new and/or changed architecture requirements and design principles incorporating current and future technology requirements.
  
  
• Works with Quality Assurance, Audit, policy teams to ensure city architecture, security and privacy standards and best practices.
  
  
• Implements and sustains an accessible enterprise repository for reference models and project-related architectural materials.
  
  
• Reviews and certifies models and architectural solutions as conforming or not to the Technology Standards, identifying remedial actions, or implications of non-compliance in an exempted design.
  
  
• Ensures that architecture enables linkage to all partners in the public and private sectors through effective communication with all levels of government, the broader public sector and the private sector.

Key Qualifications:

1. Extensive architecture experience in a leadership capacity, gained in a complex technological environment, paired with post-secondary education in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or Math (or an equivalent combination of education and experience).
   
   
2. Experienced leading major enterprise-wide architectural initiatives, such as capability modeling, road mapping etc, from planning to implementation.
   
   
3. Experience in the formulation of architectures (including requirements discovery, analysis, application of abstraction, formulation of solution context, solution alternatives identification and assessment, technology selection, and design configuration).
   
   
4. Experience with Enterprise-grade technology platforms and services.
   
   
5. Resourcefulness, analytical and problem-solving skills, paired with excellent communication skills.
   
   
6. Highly developed leadership, interpersonal, conflict resolution, negotiation, facilitation and problem-solving skills, with the ability to work collaboratively in a multidisciplinary team environment and independently as required.
   
   
7. Strong ability to motivate teams and create a collaborative working environment.
   
   
8. Ability to handle multiple competing priorities while working on complex, highly visible projects.
   
   
9. Knowledge and experience in ServiceNow platform would be considered a strong asset.