What is an Architect @ Advantage Solutions

Your passion for technology and hunger for digital transformation and innovation will help shape the future of sales and marketing within the consumer packaged goods (CPG) space for years to come. In your daily interactions, you will provide essential strategic and day-to-day leadership across the organization, working with teams of engineers and product owners, aligning cross-functional projects, and ensuring fiscal and technical alignment with the organization.

In this model, the Architect is a strategic role that directly collaborates with the Product Owners, Engineering Leads, and other key partners to define a target state vision and technical roadmap for the business domain they are responsible, including its end-to-end architecture while ensuring adherence to standards and strategic initiatives.

A successful Architect @ Advantage Solutions manifests holistic wisdom of up- and down-stream impacts of technology solutions and trends to guide the development of future products and patterns. With that, an Architect @ Advantage Solutions is a top-tier engineer with experience making high-level design choices, framing technical standards, and re-enforcing frameworks, patterns, and principles, including tools, software, and engineering execution standards.

To be effective, an Architect @ Advantage Solutions develops expertise within their domain, creates a roadmap for their systems, and communicates that plan to others within the organization. However, more than technical knowledge is required, as an Architect @ Advantage Solutions must also have the soft skills to manage and positively influence projects and people.

In addition, an Architect is expected to actively engage with our delivery team to assist with project executions, provide and receive feedback on technology and pattern use, and mentor team members.  A versatile stakeholder, the Architecture teams up with the delivery leadership to provide a holistic view of the technology landscape within the Enterprise portfolio, with specific attention to Enterprise Applications, integration, and data concerns.

Summary

• Tasks often involve investigating unique and complex problems.
• Responsible for making decisions and recommendations that are recognized as authoritative and have an essential impact on complete architectural design activities.
• Frequently involved in the conceptual stage of the design phase of a project and accepts complete responsibility for the architectural design elements of the entire project.
• Architects must keep themselves well-versed in new technology and industry trends.
• Responsible for prioritizing ever-changing tasks and scopes while ensuring that schedules and deadlines are met.
• Evaluate project costs and aid in crafting budgets for new projects.
• Provide thought leadership to and mentor product team members.
• Partner with technology vendors to identify opportunities to innovate in the Enterprise space.

Responsibilities include (but not limited to)

Primary Responsibilities

• Lead the collaborative development of a technology strategy and architecture that aligns with corporate strategy and goals.
• Lead the collaborative development of a technology roadmap(s) that achieves Advantage Solution's architecture.
• Provide architecture designs that consider functionality, cost, performance, scalability, reusability, security, and extensibility.
• Enhance our cloud capability by creating and implementing cloud-first patterns.
• Define and facilitate the architecture processes, including the reporting and oversight of architecture deployment.
• Work closely with peers across the organization to create and maintain architecture artifacts, operational documents, and automation playbooks.
• Provide architectural expertise, direction, and assistance to facilitate the delivery of solutions that align with business objectives in a cost-efficient manner.
• Actively seek ways to improve processes and interactions.

Secondary Responsibilities

• Collaborate with projects, products, and technical stakeholders to ensure technology and business concerns are part of roadmaps.
• Actively engage in the Enterprise strategy and the definition of roadmaps.
• Lead the strategy and delivery of the Advantage Solutions integration platform.

Qualifications / Skills / Requirements

Primary Qualifications

• Outstanding collaboration and communication skills are essential
• 10+ years of hands-on experience in architecting and designing solutions using at least three disciplines: cloud architecture, software development, data platform integration, business processes and capabilities, focusing on scalability, security, performance, and cost to serve
• 10+ years of experience in applying architecture patterns, frameworks, and principles that cover application, data, business processes, and design concepts, enabling operational flow for scenarios such as application to application, business to business (B2B), direct to consumer (B2C), and digital integrations
• 10+ yrs. Experience working on large-scale projects
• 10+ yrs. Exposure to cloud-managed services, serverless technology, and microservices like Function-as-a-Service, Containers, and managed infrastructure-as-code
• 10+ yrs. Experience overseeing customized development of processes for multiple projects simultaneously
• 10+ yrs. Experience designing secure solutions based on industry specifications
• Demonstrate a track record of leading collaboratively within complex organizations requiring strong influence management skills - the ability to work cooperatively at all levels in a matrix environment

Secondary Qualifications

• Proven experience delivering ERPs for a $4B+ company. Past deployment in an international setup, Oracle or SAP a plus.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience solving integration problems in a high volume (+10 millions transactions per day) environment using open-source or off-the-shelf platforms. Experience with Apache Camel a plus.
• 3+ years of experience dealing with data transformation and management using open-source or off-the-shelf platforms. Experience with ETL tools, Spark, CDC tools a plus.
• Demonstrated track record delivering mission-critical applications in the Cloud and on-prem, leveraging DevSecOps, SRE functions. Experience with Azure, Kubernetes a plus.