Why Greencore?

We are a leading manufacturer of convenience food in the UK and our purpose is to make everyday taste better. We supply all of the major supermarkets in the UK. We also supply convenience and travel retail outlets, discounters, coffee shops, foodservice and other retailers. We have strong market positions in a range of categories including sandwiches, salads, sushi, chilled snacking, chilled ready meals, chilled soups and sauces, chilled quiche, ambient sauces and pickles, and frozen Yorkshire puddings. 

In FY22 we manufactured 795m sandwiches and other food to go products, 127m chilled prepared meals, and 249m bottles of cooking sauces, pickles and condiments. We carry out more than 10,600 direct to store deliveries each day. We have 21 world-class manufacturing units across 16 locations in the UK, with industry-leading technology and supply chain capabilities. We generated revenues of £1.7bn in FY22 and employ approximately 14,000 people. 

We work hard to ensure that Greencore is a great place to work, and our people truly are at the core. We’re committed to ensuring all our colleagues have development plans and strive to provide inspiring leadership – in fact, in the past year we’ve seen an 11% increase in the number of colleagues who would recommend Greencore as a place to work.  

Why we embarked on Making Business Easier?

Over time processes have become increasingly complex, increasing both the risk and cost they pose, whilst restricting our agility. At the same time, our customers and the market expect more from us than ever before. Making Business Easier forms a fundamental foundation for our commercial and operational excellence agendas, whilst supporting managing our cost base effectively in the future.

The MBE Programme will streamline and simplify core processes, provide easier access to quality business data and will invest in the right technology to enable these processes. 

Why is this exciting for your career as a Solution Architect?

The MBE Programme presents a huge opportunity for colleagues across the technology function to play a central role in the design, shape, delivery and execution of an enterprise wide digital transformation programme. The complexity of the initiative, within a FTSE 250 business, will allow for large-scale problem solving, group wide impact assessment and supporting the delivery of an enablement project to future proof the business. You will have the opportunity to work with colleagues across the business and bring a best practice approach to the function. Designing and shaping the solution and methodologies utilising your experience and expertise gives a platform for success and team ship building as Greencore, build, mature, strengthen and bolster their Technology department.  

What you'll be doing as a Solution Architect at Greencore? 

As a Solutions Architect at Greencore, you will be providing architectural guidance, direction, design, and governance to both internal and external partners across a range of applications and technologies.  

You will be: 

• Defining the future state for applications and infrastructure delivering business outcomes and capabilities 
• Producing capability roadmaps and supporting documentation to define how we will get to future state 
• Production and maintenance of capability maps for functional areas and key elements of the IT architecture 
• Owning the production and quality of High-Level Design documents (HLD) that identify the solution and all aspects of the solution including support, disaster recovery and any licensing considerations 
• Working with business stakeholders to design solutions that satisfy the requirements of the business, take into consideration the full lifecycle, including strategic direction, TCO and supportability 
• Delivering designs that provide appropriate levels of security, resilience and recovery capabilities 
• Identifying and monitoring new trends and directions in IT and industry that could bring benefit to Greencore and present these back to the team 
• Working closely with delivery teams, successfully handing over designs, providing guidance and governance to ensure that designs and company standards are followed, any exceptions recorded and approved as required 
• Involved in driving innovative thinking and assisting colleagues to prototype ideas that can bring real advantage to the business 
• Defining and maintaining technical policies, procedures and standards and provides assurance on adherence 
• Providing technical and financial estimate input into proposal documents 
• Providing technical governance and/or assurance into the delivery and operations functions to ensure designs, policies and procedures are understood and followed 

What we’re looking for?

• Ideally you will be educated to Degree level or equivalent, significant experience across different types of IT project. Infrastructure, Public Cloud services, Applications (Inc. SaaS) 
• You will have experience of working cross functionally, experience of agile project management 
• You must have a minimum of 3 years experience working as an architect at a similar level 
• You will have experience of technology supporting business transformation on a significant scale, in particular ERP implementations or consolidations. ERP integration to the wider business application estate 
• You will have experience of developing and maintaining enterprise-wide capability maps and specific technology roadmaps 
• You will have experience developing complex solution architectures in modern compute paradigms i.e. cloud, microservices, integrations 
• You will have sufficient technical skill to evaluate all aspects of a solution and guide technical teams in their detailed design and delivery processes 
• You will be confident in your ability to make decisions that encompass the entire end-to-end lifecycle of a solution and its application within the organisation