Solution Architect

Chicago, Illinois, United States | Full-time | Fully remote

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Summary/Objective:

The Solution Architect serves as the critical link between technical teams and business needs, responsible for analyzing requirements, crafting comprehensive architectural designs, and ensuring alignment with business objectives. This role encompasses technical leadership by guiding teams, making informed technology choices, and mitigating potential risks throughout project lifecycles.  

Essential functions:

Requirement Analysis and Solution Design:

  • Engage with clients to understand their business processes, needs, and requirements. 

  • Translate client requirements into architectural designs and specifications. 

  • Work closely with Business Analysts and Stakeholders to ensure the proposed design aligns with business objectives. 

  • Present and explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and clients. 

Technical Leadership and Decision-Making: 

  • Provide guidance to development teams, ensuring that technical solutions align with the architectural vision. 
  • Make key decisions regarding the selection of tools, frameworks, and methodologies to be used in projects. 

  • Ensure the solution fits within the broader enterprise context and adheres to established standards and best practices. 

  • Identify, analyze, and address any potential technical risks or challenges that could impact the delivery of the solution. 

Stakeholder Communication and Collaboration:

  • Collaborate with Product, Engineering, QA, Infrastructure, and other stakeholders throughout the project lifecycle. 

  • Ensure that all stakeholders are aligned on the proposed solutions, the associated benefits, and the potential trade-offs. 

  • Regularly review and provide feedback on project deliverables, ensuring that they meet the defined architectural standards and client expectations. 

  • Act as a bridge between technical teams and business stakeholders, facilitating effective communication. 

Continuous Improvement and Research:

  • Stay updated with the latest trends, tools, technologies, and best practices in the software industry. 

  • Evaluate and recommend new technologies or methodologies that could enhance the firm's offerings and solutions. 

  • Participate in or lead internal initiatives to improve processes, tools, and methodologies used by the consulting firm.  

Deployment:

  • Accountable for the overall project outcome 

  • Ensure the team follows proper deployment practices. 

  • Ensure the team can create and maintain an automated build process that will run all the unit tests, both server side and client side, deploy code to staging, and prepare deployment-ready files for production environments. 

  • Ensure deployments follow a well-designed and documented process that provides for remediating failures. 

QA:

  • Ensure there is a documented testing plan for the project. 

  • Ensure the team is prepared for Sprint review by testing expected functionality beforehand. 

  • Set timelines for QA to occur and communicate to the team. 

  • Work with the team to validate UI functionality, data integrity, and code quality. 

  • Establish peer testing and code review practices. 

Competencies:

  1. Solutioning / problem-solving 

  1. Client / Consulting expertise 

  1. Team / Project leadership 

  1. Communication and collaboration expertise

Required education and experience:

At least 12 years of professional experience. It is preferred that at least 5 years will have been in a client consulting capacity.

Technical Environment:

  • IDE such as Visual Studio, or VS Code

  • Databases such as SQL Server, or Postgres

  • Cloud Providers such as AWS or Azure

  • Back-End languages and frameworks such as .Net, C#, Linq, EF

  • Front-End languages and frameworks such as ASP.NET, Angular or another Front-End framework like React or Vue, HTML, CSS, JavaScript/Typescript

  • Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, Serverless Framework, Cloud Formation, or ARM templates.

  • Cloud computing resources such as AWS (API Gateway, Lambdas, SNS, SQS, RDS, Dynamo, etc.), and Azure (API Manager, App Services, Functions, ASB, Cosmos, etc.)

  • DevOps pipelines and tools such as Azure DevOps, or Jenkins

  • Containers and orchestration tools such as Docker, Kubernetes, AWS ECS and ECR or Azure AKS and ACR.

Required education and experience:   

At least 12 years of professional experience. It is preferred that at least 5 years will have been in a client consulting capacity.

Equal Employment Opportunity

All employment decisions shall be made without regard to age, race, creed, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, citizenship status or any other basis as protected by federal, state, or local law.

Disclaimer

This description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties, or responsibilities that are required of the employee. Other duties, responsibilities and activities may change or be assigned at any time with or without notice.