Solution Architect Sr - Contractor

Position Location: Hybrid (2-3 days/week in office) - Pittsburgh, PA; Strongsville, OH; or Phoenix, AZ

Summary:

Act as a member of a delivery team, supporting both new development/project-based efforts, and production support; and is considered the highest level domain technology expert. They are responsible for the assessment of business requirements; collection, identification, and approval of technical specifications; and the subsequent development of technology solutions that require development to be viable (i.e., business applications, LOB applications, work flow systems, purchased applications, developed applications, and applications integration). This role will envision and create solutions that meet requirements; model the pieces of an infrastructure and their points of integration; prove the feasibility of a design; create the design artifacts that are required to deliver and to maintain the infrastructure; guide a solution through to its completion; and ultimately can be implemented and supported in production.

They will work with the Enterprise Architecture team to ensure that new technology solutions are designed in accordance to architectural standards; for optimal access and usefulness; to leverage existing technologies; and to understand enterprise-wide impacts to people, process, and technology. They will assist in near/mid-term roadmap creation, to address gaps and move the domain towards its future state architecture, in support of future business growth and innovation.

Job Responsibilities:

• Establish domain specific standards, near/mid-term strategy, and roadmaps (0-18 months), in adherence to, and in support of Enterprise standards, strategy, and roadmaps; provide direction on the implementation and execution.

• Assist in creating the vision for future state technologies and architecture and participate in setting Enterprise standards and mid/long-term strategy / roadmaps (18-60 months), acting as domain specific subject matter experts.

• Responsible for domain specific content/collateral, based on the EA standards/ methodologies, to document the current state architecture, and to submit as artifacts into the Enterprise Architecture (EA) Repository; including contributions and validation of Operational processes and procedures.

• Develop technology specifications and ensure that new technology solutions are designed for optimal access and usefulness, leverage existing technologies when possible, and adhere to Enterprise Architecture standards.

• Apply architectural and engineering concepts to design a solution that meets operational requirements, such as scalability, maintainability, security, reliability, extensibility, flexibility, availability, and manageability.

• Assist in identifying the technologies to employ based on price, performance, service agreements, and organization constraints.

• Participate and lead research and development efforts (proof’s of concept, prototypes), as subject matter experts, when introducing new technologies.

• Provide technical expertise to propose level of effort estimates (LOE), work breakdown structures, and technical resource planning for proposed and current work to support the Project Management Office (PMO) and Demand Management process.

• Ability to gain buy-in on proposed solutions.

• Provide input to management throughout the project management lifecycle (PMLC).

• Assist managers with developing the service level agreements (SLAs) and deployment of key performance measures.

• Participate in various phases of the SDLC to perform QA/architectural review functions, and to ensure adherence to Enterprise Architecture (EA) technology standards and project specific solutions architecture. (i.e., design reviews).

• Ensure technology solutions are production ready and meet the defined specifications; and that the solution can be maintained via production support methodologies and resources (knowledge management).

• Serve as technical owner and point of contact for domain specific solutions, in the Production environment.

• Facilitate communications between IS workgroups and business stakeholders for technical issues and/or major changes; acting as the technical domain subject matter expert.

• Ensure technology solutions in Production are monitored and assessed for performance and sustainability through periodic health checks (such as capacity planning, incident and problem reviews).

• Assume ownership of problems and incidents and communicates critical situation status.

• Review the ongoing implementation solution for improvement opportunities.

• Assist in IS Service Management policy and processes to effectively support domain. Assisted processes would include Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Knowledge Management, and Performance Management.

• Provide technical guidance to coach and mentor team members; provide performance feedback to manager(s).

• Keep current and informed of domain related technologies and best practices.

Must Have Technical Skills:

Most critical: Public Cloud infrastructure technologies. Deployments in the cloud. Kafka/streaming. Microservice.

• Working knowledge of Unified Modeling Language (UML) developmental modeling language

• Working knowledge of Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) diagrams

• Working knowledge of and experience with Kubernetes, OpenShift, or similar container based systems

• Working knowledge of and experience with Kafka, MQ, or similar event or messaging based systems

• Working knowledge of Cloud-Native design principles, such as 12-Factor App

• Working knowledge of Microservice design principles

• Working knowledge of and experience with Public Cloud infrastructure and provisioning (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), such as Azure, AWS, GCP

• 1 year experience with source code using git or similar distributed version control.

• 1 year experience with technical documentation creation using Confluence or similar wiki systems.

• 1 year experience with work assignment issue tracking using Jira or similar ticket systems.

• Prefer security certifications such as Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certified Cloud Security Professional (CSSP), Certified Identity and Access Manager (CIAM) and Certified Identity Management Professional (CIMP).

Flex / Nice to Have Skills:

Actimize is strongly preferred

Soft Skills:

• Extreme ownerships of assignments, delegations or observed needs or opportunities

• Utmost conscientiousness of tasks

• Clearly and effectively document and communicate technical details.

Minimum Education and/or Experience:

• B.S. in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related major or equivalent IS / business experience.

• Prefer security certifications such as Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certified Cloud Security Professional (CSSP), Certified Identity and Access Manager (CIAM) and Certified Identity Management Professional (CIMP).

• 6-8 years experience years of IS / business experience, more specifically programming, engineering and/or systems analysis. Has a broad level of understanding surrounding information systems.

• 4 years of strong experience with deployment and administration of J2EE application servers and containers (e.g., Websphere, JBoss, Tomcat, Spring etc.); TIBCO suite of tools; Informatica suite of tools (e.g. PowerCenter, IDQ)

• 4 years of experience with SOA, ESB, JMS messaging, transaction, XML and/or Web Services integration technologies.