Principal Systems Design / Architecture Engineer - NTT Data

Your day at NTT DATA

• The Principal Systems Design / Architecture Engineer is a highly skilled subject matter expert, responsible for providing expertise in defining the architecture for large systems.
• This role conducts system design activities to ensure that architectural solutions meet technical and functional requirements.
• The Principal Systems Design / Architecture Engineer performs architectural analysis, evaluation, and design of systems that support and seeks to solve complex business and technical problems.

Key responsibilities:

• Provides technical expertise on system design activities and advises on the review of application, software, and system components across a variety of technology stacks.
• Ensures that architectural solutions meet technical and functional requirements.
• Works cross functionally to review existing system architecture and recommends improvements.
• Leads the investigation and scoping of change requests to determine the scale of work to be done and estimate the timeframe and input required.
• Determines system loads and volumes as input into infrastructure requirements.
• Ensures that proposed and existing systems architectures are aligned with the company’s goals and strategies.
• Enables the design and development of new systems and solutions.
• Ensures that new systems and solutions conform to current system architecture and/or align to strategic system architectural direction.
• Leads architectural analysis, evaluation, and design of systems that support and seek to solve complex business and technical problems.
• Enables and ensures that system architecture is delivered in the form of robust and scalable solutions to business problems and needs.
• Identifies, evaluates, and assesses risks in order to mitigate them and eliminates any factor that may interfere or hinder the delivery of the architectural solution and dependent functional requirements.
• Advises on specifications for solutions functional and technical requirements, and implementation phases required in order to deliver on and solve complex business problems.
• Implements architectural governance, standards, metrics for measuring, monitoring and improving architecture.
• Proactively identifies potential problems that could be remediated by more effective architectural solutions.
• Performs any other related task as required.

Knowledge, and Attributes:

• Excellent business acumen with excellent communication and organizational skills.
• Ability to effectively deal with stakeholders in challenging situations.
• Ability to navigate through complexity and ambiguity.
• Extended knowledge of system architecture, design, and delivery.
• Extended understanding of regulatory requirements and organizational standards.
• Extended knowledge of the system design lifecycle models.
• Extended ability to design systems compatible with cloud computing architectures and selection of components.
• Extended ability to design and select system components.
• Excellent planning and decision-making skills.
• Excellent ability to use a variety of design tools.
• Extended understanding of software development practices, including Agile and CI/CD.
• Extended expertise in containerization technologies, such as Docker/Kubernetes.
• Extended expertise in data security and privacy best practices.
• Extended knowledge of clean code concepts, design patterns, test driven (TDD) and behavioral driven development (BDD).

Academic qualifications and certifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in Information Technology, Computer Science or related field.
• Recommended certifications such as Cloud (Azure Solutions Architect Expert, AWS Certified Solutions Architect); TOGAF preferred.

Key Skills:

Strategic & Architectural Skills

• Integration Architecture Design: Expertise in designing scalable, secure, and maintainable integration solutions.
• Enterprise Integration Patterns: Deep understanding of messaging, orchestration, choreography, and data transformation.
• Solution Architecture: Ability to align integration solutions with business goals and enterprise architecture.

Azure Platform Expertise

• Azure Logic Apps: Designing workflows for business process automation.
• Azure API Management: Architecting secure and scalable API gateways.
• Azure Service Bus & Event Grid: Implementing asynchronous messaging and event-driven architectures.
• Azure Functions: Leveraging serverless computing for lightweight integrations.
• Azure Data Factory: Designing data pipelines for ETL and data movement.

Security & Governance

• Identity & Access Management: Using Azure AD, OAuth2, and RBAC for secure integrations.
• Compliance & Data Protection: Ensuring solutions meet regulatory requirements (e.g., GDPR, POPIA).
• Governance Models: Defining policies for API usage, data flow, and integration lifecycle.

DevOps & Automation

• CI/CD Pipelines: Architecting automated deployment pipelines using Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.
• Monitoring & Observability: Designing logging and alerting strategies using Azure Monitor and Application Insights.

Technical Breadth

• Hybrid Integration: Connecting on-premises systems (e.g., BizTalk, SAP) with cloud services.
• Data Formats & Protocols: Proficiency in JSON, XML, XSLT, REST, SOAP, and GraphQL.
• Integration Tools: Familiarity with BizTalk Server, MuleSoft, or other middleware platforms.

Certifications (Highly Recommended)

• Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate
• TOGAF or other enterprise architecture frameworks (optional but valuable)

Soft Skills

• Stakeholder Engagement: Communicating effectively with business and technical teams.
• Leadership: Guiding development teams and mentoring junior engineers.
• Documentation & Standards: Defining integration standards and maintaining architectural artifacts.

Required experience:

• Extended demonstrated experience in similar IT roles, with a focus on system design/architecture engineering.
• Extended demonstrated working experience in a large-scale organization.
• Extended demonstrated experience, judgment and drive to plan, make decisions and accomplish individual and team goals.
• Extended demonstrated experience with software development lifecycles.
• Extended demonstrated experience working in a team-oriented, collaborative environment.
• Extended demonstrated systems and/or software development experience is essential.
• Extended proficiency in cloud-based architectures, preferably in popular cloud platforms (Azure, AWS).
• Extended proficiency in designing and implementing scalable, distributed, and high-performance systems.
• Extended proficiency in software design and architecture, ideally with experience dealing with large datasets.