Purpose

The Senior Manager, Solution Design provides technology planning, strategy, direction and design choices within solutions used to meet the business requirements of SITA customers. This includes providing guidance, support and advice in the proposal, implementation and deployment for any new or existing product developments as part of a customer solution. The Senior Manager manages a team of Solution Designers and Architects.

Remuneration

Base Salary + Bonus + Benefits

Key Responsibilities

- Design technical solutions that provide availability, reliability, stability, manageability, scalability and security that can be fully supported by SITA;
- Provide planning, consultancy, documentation and knowledge transfer expertise as required to the business units and customers for new technologies;
- Carry out the evaluation and selection of vendors across SITA for the provision of solutions to meet customer and business requirements;
- Build, develop and maintain effective working relationships between business units and customers to fulfill business goals, and other groups within the organization (for example, Product management, Software Development, Infrastructure services, Enterprise Architecture etc), to ensure policies, strategies and objectives are met;
- Develop and maintain effective business/project relationships with operations and infrastructure teams, ensuring all requirements from the business units and customers are met;
- Gather business requirements and create complex technical solutions to meet customer requirements;
- Effectively consider trade-offs between performance, scalability, reliability, availability, maintainability, manageability and business requirements;
- Support sales groups or competency centers during the pre-contract phases (qualification, proposal and contract) with inputs to project approval board process, ensuring that the offers and contracts are realistic and achievable in delivery from a technological standpoint;
- Understand customer's business, commercial and technology drivers, and translate into the best solution;
- Produce professional materials and reports to the customers in agreed form and time scale;
- Successfully transition design responsibilities from a bid phase into a delivery design phase;
- Participate in the selling process together with the sales team;
- Follow Air Transport Community IT market developments, keeping technical knowledge and skills up to date;
- Design and coordinate the development of complex business solutions which may involve different parties and develop sales strategies that enable customer solutions;
- Contribute to and develop technical account strategies with the sales team to ensure maximum account penetration and commercial benefits for SITA in the long term;

Education & Qualifications

- Degree or equivalent experience in Engineering, Computer Technologies, or Business
- MBA is a plus

Experience

- 7 - 10 years of experience in an Information Technology solutions provider environment or airline operations management

Knowledge & Skills

- Detailed knowledge of passenger airline processes
- Solid understanding of airline passenger management systems
- Breadth of expertise in a passenger air carrier's business practices
- Understanding of system integration and hardware issues
- Strong understanding of requirements assessment and design recommendations
- Understands Enterprise Architecture/IT Strategy
- Ability to translate business to technical requirements
- Understands procurement and asset management
- Technical and commercial knowledge of SITA's product portfolio and competition equivalent
- Able to assess impact of ATC IT trends both from an internal and external environment
- Strong negotiation skills
- Bid and proposal management experience
- Reasonable awareness and understanding of industry drivers
Senior level management interfacing
- Conceptualizing and organizing complex tasks
- Customer facing skills
- Willingness to travel
- Commercial awareness
- Good writing, communication, and presentation skills
- Able to work in a matrix management organization
- Knowledge of operational support processes