Solution Architect II (Contract to Hire role)

Solution Architect II for a customer located in Richmond, Virginia. The selected Solution Architect II will operate as a leader and change agent along with participating in the delivery of business value and contribute to the development of our technological vision in support of our business strategy. This role will partner with Solution Architects, developers, engineers, IT leaders and business stakeholders to identify future state architectures that enable business outcomes while evolving the IT landscape. The Solution Architect II will identify and formulate architectural solutions to support their assigned IT Hub, in collaboration with other Solutions Architects & Engineers, to guide and evolve our overall development and technology practices.

Responsibilities:

• Lead development of solution architectures while understanding, and solving for the complexity of co-existing with, and transforming, legacy environments
• Develop and maintain a growth mindset to learn and master new technologies
• Partner with key stakeholders within IT and across the business teams to develop consistency in architecture, design patterns, frameworks, development methodologies, guidelines, standards and best practices.
• Digest and evaluate business requirements in order to design architecture in support of the desired business outcome.
• Communicate, improve and evolve architecture practices, principles, tools to enable IT and business value
• Develop innovative solution architectures that are cohesive, fit for purpose and ensure cost effective enablement of business capabilities. Create and share reference architectures used to deploy solutions, platforms and technologies using common frameworks and patterns.
• Mentor and coach IT staff on new technologies, best practices, frameworks, patterns and architecture approaches
• Identify, assess and recommend emerging technologies and industry trends that enable business outcomes, deliver value and offer simplification
• Ensure that solutions are focusing on reuse, reliability, standardization and simplification at a functional, enterprise, or operational level
• Solve complex business problems using a creative and pragmatic approach to problem solving and solutioning
• Comfortable and skilled in delivering technical and business presentations to an audience including business stakeholders, developers or engineers.
• Demonstrate the established cultural principles throughout the organization: Our IT organization is grounded in a shared commitment to core principles that shape how we work and deliver value. We uphold transparency by communicating openly, fostering trust, and ensuring visibility into decisions and progress. We design for resiliency, creating systems and processes that are dependable, adaptable, and able to recover quickly from setbacks. We prioritize understanding of our business goals, our users, and the technologies we steward to ensure alignment and relevance. We pursue continuous learning, staying curious and open to growth in a rapidly evolving landscape. We promote knowledge sharing to strengthen collective expertise and collaboration across teams. And we seek simplicity in our solutions, reducing complexity to make our work more maintainable, efficient, and user-friendly.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor s degree with emphasis in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field.
• 2 or more years of previous experience in an IT architecture role (Enterprise, Solution, Integration, or Application) required
• Demonstrated expertise using agile methodologies, principles, and frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, SAFe or other scaled agile frameworks
• Outstanding influencing and consensus building skills
• Ability to conduct technological analyses and research
• Strong communication, teamwork and collaboration skills required to evangelize technology subjects across all levels of the organization
• Ability to manage tradeoffs and risks, adapt to change & uncertainty and make recommendations with imperfect information
• Exceptional analytical and critical thinking skills
• Strategic thinking and time management skills
• Preferred Experience:
• 1-3 years of experience in modern architecture principles, frameworks, and practices (microservices, EDA, SOA, mobility, integration, etc.), while also having the skillset to interoperate modern and legacy environments
• 1-2 years of experience in one or more of the following areas: Integration Architecture or Middleware (ESB, ETL, EAI, MOM, MQ; Boomi, Kafka, MuleSoft, etc.)
• 1-2 years of experience with APIs & knowledge of API Gateways (Kong), Web Servers, REST, Portals, HTML/CSS, JavaScript
• 1-2 years of experience in one or more of the following areas: Software Development, DevOps, RPA, Low/No Code
• 1-2 years of experience in Analytics/Business Intelligence, AI/ML, Data Fabric, Big Data /MPP
• Experience in Cybersecurity principles & practices
• Experience in cloud computing (AWS, MS Azure, Google Cloud Platform) & SaaS/PaaS
• Experience with virtual machines, serverless computing or containers
• Experience with technology relative to Pega, SalesForce, Denodo, Kafka, Kong, SQL Server, DB2, RPG, Java, MongoDB, Python
• Must be able to comply with all company policies, rules, procedures and Code of Conduct
• Must be able to interact well with others
• Must be able to work independently, or in a team setting
• Must be capable of working under tight time constraints in a high volume environment with multiple priorities
• Responds well to questions; Ability to read, interpret and comply with written information and documents such as safety rules, operations / procedure manuals and maintenance instructions with a high comprehension and concentration level to include the ability to meet deadlines