Architect II – Enterprise Solutions

UST is looking for a highly energetic and collaborative Lead Solutions Architect with experience building enterprise digital solutions on Cloud platforms. The Lead Solutions Architect will be responsible and accountable for architecting and designing comprehensive talent technology solutions that meet requirements for a leading Retailer in the United States. The ideal candidate is expected be accountable for partnering with key roles (e.g. senior leaders, project managers, business analysts, technology & development partners, etc.) to define strategies and solutions which are aligned with architecture principles, leverage common solutions and services, and meet the financial targets (cost and benefits). Within the solution development lifecycle, the Lead Solutions Architect will be accountable for solution evaluation and selection, buy vs. build decisions, and early-phase project estimates which contribute to the business case. They will also provide consulting during the detailed design, build, test, and deploy phases, and reengaged to perform benefits realization. Identify and manage existing and emerging risks that stem from business activities and ensure these risks are effectively identified and escalated to be measured, monitored, and controlled. The candidate should be a proven self-starter with demonstrated ability to make decisions and accept responsibility and risk. Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to collaborate effectively with domain experts and IT leadership team is key to be successful in this role.

 

Responsibilities:

 

As a Lead Solutions Architect, you will

• Provide architecture leadership & subject matter expertise to client engagements focusing on complex & innovative products and reusable assets.

• Create innovative and practical designs that account for the end-to-end technical solution of a system, in line with the business strategy and objectives and within the context of client’s technology environment.

• Produce conceptual and logical architectures to meet strategic business, financial, and technology objectives through documentation of systems, architectures, process flows, and value-chains

• Drive the effort in identifying, defining and implementing reusable assets and standards. The Lead solutions architect is also responsible for adherence to these standards and consumption of reusable assets across products and portfolios.

• Work closely and continuously with the business/client to focus on meeting business/client requirements and incorporating broader aspects such as overall product costs/revenue, data privacy & sovereignty, business continuity, information security, integration with other systems, etc.

Define and document business technology domains via blueprints of the current state, target state, and roadmaps to guide technology investment.

• Ensure relevant technical strategies, policies, standards and practices are applied correctly across Technology programs/projects and products

• Pioneer the development of architecture governance structures, methodologies and compliance activities.

• Ensure alignment of initiative solutions designs with the architecture and technology strategies.

• Identify and resolve technical and process impediments preventing delivery teams from meeting delivery commitments.

• Align and collaborate with architects, other team leads, and IT leadership to develop technical architectural runways supporting upcoming features and capabilities.

• Diagnose and troubleshoot performance and other issues.

• Collaborate with peers, reviewing complex change and enhancement requests.

• Evaluate potential changes and enhancements for objectives, scope and impact.

• Technical leadership across a broad scale of talent acquisition tools, technologies, and architecture models.

• Recognizes industry technology trends and emerging technologies, understands how they apply to the client Tech environment and can drive their adoption into our organization.

• Build and maintain active relationships with customers to determine business requirements.

• Partner with other IT teams during integration activities to facilitate successful implementations.

• Effectively communicate designs/solutions in multiple forums and to various audiences including technology and business executive.

• Drive buy vs. build decisions based on reviewing products and capabilities within the enterprise as well as leading industry technology partners, products and technologies

• Evangelizes and encourages importance of technical quality, emerging technologies, sharing & experimentation across the org through mentoring, hackathons, communities etc.

 

Requirements:

• BA/BS degree or technical institute training or equivalent work experience

• Minimum of 15+ years overall IT industry experience

• Minimum of 5+ years in a solution or technical architect role using service and hosting solutions such as private/public cloud IaaS, PaaS and SaaS platforms

• 2+ years’ experience in architecting and designing technical solutions for Microsoft-centric solutions based on industry standards using Azure Data Platform for Enterprise Data Migration Strategy & Implementation

• Expertise working in Data Governance

• Experience with Big Data processing frameworks (Spark, Hadoop) is required.

• Experience with DevOps tools and techniques (Continuous Integration, Jenkins, Puppet) is required.

• Managed the end-to-end lifecycles of a project in solution architect capacity

• Experience guiding and mentoring other Architects.

• Experience with multi-geography, multi-tier service design and management.

• Strong effective communication skills, both written and verbal

 

Location: This position will be based in Bentonville, AR

Role Proficiency:

Review design and optimize applications transforming into scalable solutions in ERP/CRM systems

 

Outcomes:

1.   Select appropriate technical options for development such as reusing improving or reconfiguration of existing components.
2.   Identify the problem patterns and improve the technical design of the application/system
3.   Optimizes efficiency cost and quality.
4.   Interpret the application/feature/component design to develop the same in accordance with specifications.
5.   Validate results with user representatives integrates and commissions the overall solution.
6.   Influence and improve customer satisfaction through effects like (but not limited to) offering suggestions for code refactoring and for improvements in business processes completing sprint deliverables ahead of time helping client architects and product owners by way of design suggestions and/or explaining functionality to business stakeholders etc.
7.   Influence and improve employee engagement within the project teams
8.   Learn and implement newly released technology features wherever possible.
9.   Attend industry/technology specific conferences (if any) and share knowledge with the team.
10.   Conduct peer reviews and demand high quality standards from the reviewed deliverables.
11.   Contribute to ERP/CRM Practice related activities like (but not limited to) assembling content for case studies contributing to reusability coordinating internal seminars and conducting knowledge sharing sessions during organizing sessions and participating in hackathons etc.
12.   Conduct technical assessments for hiring candidates in architect/lead roles.
13.   Review design and ensure adoption of industry best practices
14.   Design execute and maintain business domain solution architecture
15.   Guide and review technical delivery by internal teams
16.   Resolve delivery and design issues. Own the design of a complex module for projects of the following nature: architecture enhancements/mid-sized development projects/maintenance projects
17.   Serve as technology and process expert
18. Use expertise and skills in enterprise solutions technologies to develop/enhance the ERP/CRM Practice.

 

Measures of Outcomes:

1.   Number of applicable technical/domain certifications completed
2.   Adherence to process and standards (coding standards)
3.   Number of mandatory trainings (industry/technology specific trainings UST mandatory trainings) completed
4.   Adherence to schedule and timelines
5.   Number of technical sessions conducted within Practice for the benefit of peers and team members.
6.   Number of RFPs and estimations prepared in ERP/CRM Practice
7.   Number of Practice members guided to expand their technical knowledge in specific areas apart from their assigned work.
8.   Contribute to technology capability development (e.g. Training Webinars Blogs)
9.   Customer feedback on overall project implementation quality (zero technology related escalations)
10.   Business Development (number of proposals contributed to as applicable)
11.   Number of technology specific communities in which the role holder is active

 

Outputs Expected:

Solution Definition & Design:

1. Define Architecture for mid-sized type of project.
2. Design the technical framework and implement the same.
3. Identify and conduct design of complex sub-components /module in collaboration with project team architects and client SME.
4. Present the detailed design documents to relevant stakeholders and seek feedback.
5. Undertake project specific Proof of Concepts activities to validate technical feasibility with guidance from the Solution Architect.
6. Carry out best optimized solution and resolve performance issues.
7. Support the team in the design of functional modules and review the deliverables.
8. Conduct code reviews.

 

Interface with Customer:

1. Clarify requirements and provide guidance to development team.
2. Present design options to customers.
3. Implementation reviews with stakeholders.
4. Work closely with customer architects for finalizing design.
5. Proactively influence customer thought process

 

Assists others in resolving complex technical problems:

1. Manage all aspects of problem management investigating the root cause of problems and recommends SMART (specific measurable achievable realistic timely) solutions

 

Development and review of Standards & Documentation:

1. Maintenance of software process improvement activities and communicate them to a range of individuals teams and other entities.

 

Domain relevance:

1. Advise software developers on design and development of feature / component with deeper understanding of the business problem being addressed for the client.
2. Learn more about the customer domain and identify opportunities to provide value additions to customers.
3. Complete relevant domain certifications

 

Requirement gathering and Analysis:

1. Understand functional and non-functional requirements.
2. Collect non-functional requirements (such as response time throughput numbers user load etc.) through discussions with SMEs business users.
3. Identify technical aspects as part of story definition especially at an architecture / component level.

 

Project Management Support:

1. Share technical inputs from Agile/project planning perspective with SCRUM Master / Project Manager.
2. Help SCRUM Masters / project managers to understand the technical risks and come-up with mitigation strategies.
3. Help developers overcome technical challenges.

 

Technology Consulting:

1. Analysis of technology landscape process tools based on project objectives.

 

Business and Technical Research:

1. Understand application architecture and its criticality to analyze and assess tools (internal/external) on specific parameters.
2. Understand application architecture and its criticality to Support Architect/Sr. Architect in drafting recommendations based on findings of Proof Of Concept.
3. Understand application architecture and its criticality to analyze and identify new developments in existing technologies (e.g. methodologies frameworks accelerators etc.)
4. Understand application architecture and its criticality in documenting these new developments (e.g. report white paper national/ international publications) in order to build team capabilities.

 

Project Estimation:

1. Provide support for project estimations of business proposals and support sprint level / component level estimates.
2. Articulate estimation methodology module level estimations for more standard projects with focus on effort estimation alone

 

Proposal Development:

1. Contribute to proposal development of small to medium size projects from technology/architecture perspective

 

Knowledge Management & Capability Development:

1. Conduct technical trainings/ webinars to impart knowledge to relevant application development/ project teams.
2. Create collaterals (e.g. case study business value documents summary etc.)
3. Gain industry standard certifications on technology and architecture consulting.
4. Contribute to knowledge repository and tools.
5. Create reference architecture model reusable design patterns and reusable components from the project.

 

Process Improvements / Delivery Excellence:

1. Identify avenues to improve project delivery parameters (e.g. productivity efficiency process security etc.) by leveraging tools automation etc.
2. Understand various technical tools used in the project to improve efficiency and productivity.

 

Skill Examples:

1.   Proactively identifying solutions for technical issues
2.   Ability to maintain technical evaluation procedures
3.   Ability to estimate project effort based on the requirements
4.   Perform and evaluate test results against product specifications
5.   Break down complex problems into logical components
6.   Interface with other teams designers and other parallel practices
7.   Set goals for self and team. Provide feedback for team members
8.   Create and articulate impactful technical presentations
9.   Follow high level of business etiquette in emails and other business communication
10.   Drive conference calls with customers and answer customer questions
11.   Ability to work under pressure determine dependencies risks facilitate planning while handling multiple tasks.
12.   Build confidence with customers by meeting the deliverables in time with quality.
13.   Software Development Process Tools & Techniques: Demonstrates thorough knowledge of end to end SDLC process (Agile and Traditional) SDLC methodology programming principles tools best practices (refactoring code code package etc.)
14.   Estimation and Resource Planning: Specialized knowledge in estimation and resource planning techniques (e.g. TCP estimation model case based scenario-based estimation work breakdown structure estimation etc.)
15.   Requirement Gathering and Analysis: Applies specialized knowledge of requirements gathering for (non-functional) requirements analysis for functional and non-functional requirement analysis tools (such as functional flow diagrams activity diagrams blueprint storyboard) techniques (such as business analysis process mapping etc.) and requirements management tools (such as MS Excel) and basic knowledge of functional requirements gathering

 

Knowledge Examples:

 
Additional Comments:

None