This Solution Architect role is responsible for leading technology design and solutions for our emerging Commerce and Store Technology investments, including driving technology adoption, innovations, and systems process transformations to deliver seamless personalized customer and employee experiences. Designing and implementing solutions at the “Edge” for Retail store and IOT solutions, including but not limited to Point-of-Sale (POS), Returns, Inventory Management (RFID), Loss Prevention, Labor Management, Marketing Digital Displays, and In-Store Communications. Providing solution design and production readiness planning for in-store innovations of cutting-edge hardware and software solutions creating new retail experiences for customers.

Deliverables – The Solution Architect will own and drive the creation of technical solution designs for data and analytics initiatives. They will deliver this by collaborating with key business stakeholders as well as members of the Product and Engineering teams to translate strategic business goals into technology capabilities. They will work with domain architects, cloud platform leaders, and product engineering teams to help drive robust technical architecture and design patterns based on industry best practices.

Impact – The Solution Architect drives end-to-end technology designs for diverse data portfolios through their experience, leadership, and deliverables. They will serve as catalysts to bringing the next-generation personalized experiences for our customers and employees to life by leveraging modern data technologies and platforms.

Partnerships – The Solution Architect works across many functions to drive a solution-driven design outcome for business initiatives. They work closely with product management, business leaders, domain architects, program management, and engineering leaders to build a well-designed technology solution view. The Solution Architect is a bridge between these teams thinking end-to-end on design.

Job Duties and Responsibilities:  Technical Leadership – Stays current on emerging technical trends, patterns, and solutions for domain. Acts as the resident expert for how technology for data and analytics is changing and influences business and technical teams. Acts as the end-to-end technical architecture lead for initiatives to communicate design, context, and considerations, including hands-on development of proofs-of-concept and reference architectures. Recommends, leads, and participates in solution architecture work for data and analytics domains ensuring that the architecture strategy is consistent with long-term strategic business objectives. Aligns solution to strategic technology platform, data, cloud, and reference architecture patterns and capabilities Solution Leadership – Produces and maintains technology solution views and roadmaps. Ensures these are accurate, pragmatic, and actionable within product teams and to business leaders. Maintains a consistent solution architecture design. Maintains views into current state, risks, and recommendations towards directional roadmaps. Drives execution for large business initiatives including documentation, roadmaps, communication, and alignment of solutions architecture into strategic data initiatives, business, product, and technical plans. Mentoring – Organizes discussions, planning and technical design for solution with engineering leadership. Helps assist and drive domain roadmap vision into actionable steps for engineering leaders. Mentors data engineers in solution architecture practices including implementing proof of concepts and reviewing technology solutions and code with teams Leads and organizes applications of technology patterns, approaches, practices, and technical design maturity to a business solution. Shares best practices, lessons learned and constantly updates the technical system architecture requirements based on changing technologies, and knowledge related to recent, current, and upcoming vendor products and solutions. Solution Delivery – Acts as lead for technical architecture for one or more business solutions that ensures critical thinking, security standards compliance, collaboration, alignment versus broader architecture decisions and input into domain roadmaps. Finds ways to embed processes, patterns, tooling, and automation to improve architectural maturity. Updates and maintains technical domain leadership on reviews, risks, and domain technical direction. Responsible for ensuring that architected solutions are implemented to standards.

Basic Qualifications: 7 years as a Solution Architect, Lead Architect, or similar role is required. Bachelor’s degree in computer science or engineering, OR equivalent job experience. Experience in leading complex, cross-functional problem-solving initiatives. Experience as a technical architect for a major technology cloud implementation on Azure Cloud services required. Outstanding knowledge on coding languages such as Java, Java Spring, C#, .NET Core, Python, and/or React/Angular. Minimum of 4 years of experience working with a variety of cloud-based technologies including but not limited to Azure Cloud SAAS and PAAS offerings, Cloud Data/Storage platforms, Cloud & Edge/IOT container architectures, Streaming and Queue technologies, Restful Microservice APIs. Experience with delivery of Reference, Solution, Data, and Infrastructure architecture designs including Reference Implementations / POCs Experience with working directly with Product Management and Business Leaders on capability sequencing, scoping, and dependency mapping.

Preferred Qualifications: 7-10 years of experience as a Solution Architect for a major technology implementation. Commerce, Retail, Merchandising, or Supply Chain experience a plus. Experience with refactoring monolithic applications to micro-services in the context of a Retail Domain is highly desired. Designing and implementing solutions at the “Edge” for Retail store and IOT solutions. Experience designing technology solutions for retail and supply-chain order fulfillment capabilities. Experience with Retail store technologies and solutions, including but not limited to Point-of-Sale (POS), Returns, Inventory Management (RFID), Loss Prevention, Labor Management, Marketing Digital Displays, and In-Store Communications Strong understanding of system deployment and development patterns for scale including blue/green, , CI/CD, and reliability engineering including disaster recovery and high availability design. Experience securing, deploying, scaling, developing, and troubleshooting eCommerce and Edge applications and services. Strong understanding of event streaming, messaging platforms and related technologies such as Kafka Streaming and Message Queues. Deep knowledge of more than one data persistence technology – Azure SQL Server, Postgres, Azure Cosmos, Oracle, etc Data Modeling experience including transactional messaging, relational schemas, no-sql / document storage, and other data storage solutions. Ability to analyze, problem-solve, and scope business requirements. Excellent oral and written communication skills with the ability to influence others. Ability to deliver initiatives from conception through completion. Ability to meet deadlines and prioritize work.