Lead Solution Architect

About This Role

About EWEC

EWEC (Emirates Water and Electricity Company) is the sole procurer and supplier of water and electricity in the emirate of Abu Dhabi. EWEC drives the planning, forecasting, purchasing, and system despatch services of water and electricity. EWEC fulfils these vital responsibilities through the short-term and long-term balancing of bulk supply and demand for distribution companies and authorities in Abu Dhabi and other Emirates. EWEC is supporting the government of Abu Dhabi and the government of the UAE by enabling the reduction of cost whilst also providing the increased security of supply that comes from a cleaner, larger, and more integrated system.

EWEC is mandated to implement strategic initiatives that will achieve the 60 per cent clean energy target outlined in the Abu Dhabi Department of Energy's (DoE) Clean Energy Strategic Target 2035 for Electricity Production in Abu Dhabi, in addition to enabling the achievement of UAE Water Security Strategy 2036, UAE Energy Strategy by 2050, and the UAE Net Zero by 2050 strategic initiative. EWEC is accelerating Abu Dhabi and the UAE’s energy transition by diversifying the country’s energy mix through developing and deploying renewable and clean energy as well as low-carbon intensive water desalination capacities. EWEC is part of ADQ, one of the region’s largest holding companies with a broad portfolio of major enterprises spanning key sectors of Abu Dhabi’s diversified economy. For more information, please visit www.ewec.ae.

The Lead Solution Architect is responsible for designing, evaluating, and guiding the implementation of end-to-end technology solutions, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture, security policies, and business needs. The role provides technical leadership across multiple initiatives, ensuring scalability, reliability, and efficiency in solution designs. It is a senior individual contributor and technical leader within the IT department working closely with Enterprise Architects. This role is responsible for translating enterprise strategy and architectural principles into actionable, deliverable solution designs across projects and programmes. The role provides end-to-end architectural oversight of digital initiatives, with a particular focus on strategic platforms like : Low-Code/No-Code (LCNC), Enterprise Data Platform, Enterprise Integration Platform, AI/ML Ops etc. The Lead Solution Architect supports the architectural authority during solution inception, design, delivery, and review phases, ensuring consistency, reusability, and alignment with the organisation's target architecture.

This position requires deep expertise in cloud-based architectures, custom applications, enterprise platforms, and integration frameworks, along with the ability to drive digital transformation initiatives.

Job Specific Responsibilities:

• Solution Design & Governance
• Produce high-quality solution architecture artefacts including Conceptual, Logical, and Physical architecture designs for projects of varying scale and complexity.
• Review and approve Low-Level Designs (LLDs) and Technical Design Documents (TDDs) produced by vendor, development and integration teams.
• Ensure all solutions comply with enterprise architecture standards, security policies, data governance frameworks, and regulatory requirements relevant to the utility sector.
• Conduct architecture assessments and prepare design authority reviews; contribute in Architecture Review Board (ARB) sessions as required.
• Follow and evolve solution architecture patterns, reference architectures, and architecture decision records (ADRs).

Strategic Platform Ownership

• Act as the architectural lead and subject matter expert for the Low-Code/No-Code (LCNC) platform strategy, overseeing platform selection, governance, onboarding standards, and citizen developer enablement.
• Review architectural decision for the enterprise Data Platform, including data lake/lakehouse design, data ingestion pipelines, data modelling standards, and analytics workload patterns.
• Act as the architectural lead and subject matter expert of the Integration Platform, defining integration patterns (API-led, event-driven, point-to-point, and file-based), API governance, and MFT standards.
• Evaluate and recommend new platform capabilities, vendor products, and emerging technologies relevant to the three strategic platform domains.
• Review architectural decision for the AI/ML Ops , for any solution incorporating AI/ML capabilities, including traditional ML pipelines, large language model (LLM) integrations, and Agentic AI workflows, ensuring that concerns around model governance, data privacy, hallucination risk, observability, and human-in-the-loop design are addressed before solutions progress to build.

Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement

• Work directly with Enterprise Architects to ensure solution designs are consistent with the target state architecture, roadmaps, and strategic initiatives.
• Partner with business analysts, project managers, product owners, and delivery leads to understand requirements and translate them into architectural solutions.
• Engage with senior business stakeholders and C-level executives to present architecture proposals, options analysis, and risk assessments in clear, non-technical language.
• Liaise with vendor and third-party technical teams during procurement, implementation, and hypercare phases to validate solution compliance.
• Promote architectural best practices and design standards.

Technology & Risk Management

• Identify, assess, and mitigate technical risks across solution designs and platform strategies; escalate architecture risks to the Enterprise Architecture team and governance forums.
• Review cloud and on-premises infrastructure architectures to ensure solutions are scalable, resilient, and aligned with Azure platform standards.
• Advise on cybersecurity architecture requirements including network segmentation, identity and access management (IAM), data encryption, and security by design principles.
• Support the IT department in vendor evaluations, RFP/RFI responses, and solution due diligence activities.

Documentation & Knowledge Management

• Maintain the solution architecture repository within EA tooling (Orbus iServer, SAP LeanIX or equivalent), ensuring all architecture artefacts are current and accessible.
• Produce and maintain architecture standards documentation, integration design guides, platform onboarding guides, and solution blueprints.
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of the Architecture Practice, including methodology, templates, and tooling

Essential Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree (minimum) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Electrical/Electronics Engineering, or a closely related technical discipline.
• Must have at least one Enterprise Architecture related certification: TOGAF 9 Foundation & Practitioner, or TOGAF 10 or Zachman (Practitioner or Professional level).
• Minimum of 5 years of practical experience in Enterprise Architecture, IT Strategic Planning or related field
• Extensive knowledge of Enterprise Technologies (both infrastructure, applications, data including Cloud Migration and Transformation) as well as a fundamental understanding of Software Engineering toolsets and processes used by new age companies (IaC, DSC, GitHub, CI/CD pipelines, Devops, Agile etc.)
• Extensive Knowledge of design and implementation data architecture in Cloud environments, integration and data management technologies
• Extensive knowledge of BDAT architecture and experience in projects covering all layers of architecture
• Knowledge of security Architecture in OT and IT environments