Lead Pre-Sales Architect

A UK Government Security Check (SC) clearance is required for this role. If you don’t hold SC clearance, we will support you to apply assuming you have lived and worked in the UK for a minimum of 5 years. 

As the Lead Pre-Sales Architect within Aker Systems, your primary responsibility will be to develop customer solutions that consistently outperform those produced by our competitors by innovatively and cost-effectively meeting the requirements of our customers.  You will be responsible for leading the Pre-Sales technical activities in our pursuit of new business and growth.

You must be prepared to travel to London 2-3 times a month, occasionally including an overnight stay.

Duties & Responsibilities

• Winning Proposals. You will be responsible for creating compelling technical responses to customer requirements, enabling Aker System to pursue new business via the DOS4, DOS5, GCloud, Technology Services and other commercial frameworks – either directly; or indirectly via a suitable partner or prime contractor.  You will be experienced in creating high-scoring responses to customer’s technical requirements.  You are to proactively seek customer feedback, acting upon that feedback so that we may continually improve the strength and quality of our technical responses.
• Client Engagement. You will act as an ambassador for the business supporting sales personnel in client engagements.  You will have excellent client-facing skills with the ability to influence and define enterprise solutions, data architecture transformations and their associated benefits – both financial and non-financial.  Critically, you will do more than advocate technology for technology’s sake, but instead readily articulate the business benefits and return on investment inherent in Aker System’s customer-facing solutions and relate these to the customer’s specific circumstances.
• Solution Leadership. You will be responsible for the design, planning and pricing of market-beating solutions that consistently outperform those of our competitors.  As the senior technical professional assigned to strategic bids, you will provide leadership of the solution development activities and our responses to technical requirements throughout the sales process, ensuring the overall technical response and customer solution is of winning caliber and achievable in delivery.  You shall take accountability and responsibility for your solution.  You must clearly articulate design decisions both informally in whilst developing the solution in the ‘Campaign’ phase of the sales process[1], and formally within the Company governance process.  You must be able to balance economic, commercial and technological factors to create market-beating solutions.
• Competitive Insight. Through a combination of industry experience, proactive networking (internal and external), and technology horizon scanning you will maintain a balanced view of market capability.  You are to apply this insight in the creation of customer-facing solutions by identifying the competitive nature of the individual solution estimates that inform the customers’ total cost of ownership for Aker-supplied solutions.  Estimates that fail to pass either: the commonsense test; or which are at odds with prevailing industry practices – are to be challenged and corrected to ensure that Aker Systems is able to win new business and grow by remaining competitive.
• Thought Leadership. Through proactive participation in strategic industry groups – and other 'idea generating or thought leadership' forums (such as public sector Chief Data Officer or CIO forums) – you are to enhance Aker’s profile in the market by providing thought leadership and technical white papers both to customers and internal stakeholders.
• Requirements & Needs Analysis. Through ongoing and regular contact with our customer-base – coupled with an acute understanding of competitors’ activities - you and your team will provide Aker’s CTO with a barometer of current client needs and, thereby, work collaboratively with the CTO to evolve Aker’s products and capabilities so they are able to meet and stimulate customer demand for our services.
• Risk analysis. You will be responsible for identifying solution risks and propose effective and proportionate mitigations.  Where possible, you are to develop innovative approaches that cost effectively mitigate the identified risks, providing the customer with a low-risk approach to contracting with Aker Systems – or staying with us in the event of any re-compete.
• Technical Awareness. You will maintain up-to-date knowledge of emerging trends and developments over a broad range of technologies as well as monitoring the outcomes of research work, seeking to identify where technology might be deployed in order to deliver business improvements and competitive advantage.
• Partnering for Solution Coherence. On occasion, it will be necessary to partner with external organisations and strategic partners.  You are responsible for representing the business, developing and maintaining relationships with these organisations.  As part of this activity, you will identify suitable strategic alliances to help develop our business strategy and capability in line with business requirements and budgeted growth commitments.

Core Competencies

• Technical Competencies. You are to have the following technical competencies and expertise:
  • Delivery. Designing, delivering platforms and managed services at enterprise scale, specifically bespoke software solutions, particularly in streaming and cloud-native solutions.
  • Data. Solving enterprise data and analytics problems using technology.
  • Cloud. Hands-on Public Cloud experience in either AWS/Azure/Google Cloud Platform, both their ‘services’ and ‘how’ to work in the cloud such as DevOps-centric approach.
  • Security. Having worked in sensitive data environments and ideally have experience facing off to cyber security specialists. You will either hold SC clearance or be committed to achieving this.
  • Sector. Initial target sectors and key areas of focus for sales growth are public sector and financial services.
• Experience Required. In order of priority, qualitative criteria are concerned with credibility, ability, experience and personality:
  • Aker Delivery Teams. Working closely with engineers, Analysts, Architects and other members of the Aker Technical Team.
  • Client CTO/Architects. Eventually become a go-to person for the sales teams and the client to reach out to regarding the technical direction of any client sales engagement. When necessary, liaise with other members of the Aker Technical Team regarding product developments, enhancements and feasibility of what has been proposed for a specific customer solution.
  • Aker Sales Teams. Ability to understand the Aker USPs, technology stack, hyper scalers environments and native applications/services and think on their feet in pre-sales conversations during exploratory, due diligence or customer sales engagements.
• Design Winning Solutions. You are responsible for leading solution teams capable of outperforming our competitors in order to win strategic new business opportunities aimed at delivering profitable revenue growth.  The measure of success shall be bids won ÷ total bids pursued with a target of maintaining or improving on 1 bid won for every 3 bids pursued.
• Solution Design Documentation. You are responsible for the creation, ownership and delivery of all solution design documentation – critically, this includes responses to the technical questions in the bid, which are scored during competitive evaluation. These documents include both external and internal-facing (predominantly client-facing) and shall meet the requirements of each set of stakeholders.  The measure of success shall be the technical evaluation scores for each bid on which you participate, whereby you are to achieve a technical score in excess of 90% for solution quality and the quality of the written technical bid responses.
• Solution Design Analysis. You will be responsible for assessing and analysing all aspects of the solution design to ensure that a balance is maintained between compliance and affordability, whilst always remaining competitive. This analysis should include – but is not limited to - the risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies associated with your solutions.
• Business Cases for Change. You are responsible for the production of compelling business cases for technology-enabled business change whereby the benefit (financial and non-financial) of adopting each specific change are also explained in a manner that is abundantly clear.  Where a solution, or element of a solution, is non-standard to Aker Systems will be your responsibility to explain the rationale behind your design decision. This would typically include the logic, risks, financials and associated benefits behind your recommendation.
• Identification of Partnering Approaches. Where a customer-facing solution requires an outside party, you will be responsible for assessing suitability and liaising with such partners as a component of your overall solution design.