Principal Architect

Position Title: Architect

 

Overview

 

The Principal Architect reports to the Chief Technology Officer. The primary focus of this position is to ensure the technical integrity of the enterprise platform and to formulate the technical direction for the company’s on-going strategic technical investments. The Principal Architect participates in the estimation, planning, analysis, implementation, and deployment of all large-scale development efforts and works closely with the senior level leadership of the Technology department to set direction, vision, and technical strategic objectives for the company.

 

Technical Responsibilities

 Produce system solutions and high level technical designs to meet identified business requirements. Solutions must incorporate scalability, availability, security, and maintainability characteristics. Risks, assumptions, and costs for solutions must be articulated.Analyze and design architectural improvements to core technologies to improve performance, capacity, and scalability of the webstore software. Produce business case to support these improvements.Technically evaluate all software development projects that support the enterprise. This involves establishing guidelines for acceptance and technical review of all design documents with sign-off authority.Mentor IT organization on adherence to design and architecture guidelines.Assist teams in adopting new infrastructure and technologies. Provide documentation, training and mentoring.Identify, evaluate and formally recommend third party software and technology packages and services.Actively participate in the implementation of pilots of new software applications and infrastructure.On occasion, assist in production escalations and problem resolution.

 

Leadership ResponsibilitiesPromote technical vision and sound engineering principles among technology department staff members.Propose changes in process, policy, and standards as they relate to the architecture and design principlesAssist management in the prioritization of infrastructure development projects.Actively participate in the recruiting process.Identify training/conferences that will assist in developing necessary skills for technical staff, as well as promoting an understanding of the company’s technical vision.

Required Qualifications

 

· Technology

· Extensive experience building and architecting high traffic internet sites serving 10-100 million+ requests per day or similar high transaction volume distributed systems

· 5+ years experience development experience with Java concentrating on server-side development

· Extensive experience implementing complex system integrations utilizing messaging and HTTP

· Experience tuning server side applications and databases, i.e. distributed caches

· Experience architecting highly-available, failure resistant/tolerant internet scale systems

· Leadership – Ability to think strategically. Ability to create and promote guiding development principles, and influence application developers in their ability to create technically sound solutions.

· Communication – Clear written, verbal, presentation, and process facilitation skills.

· Accessibility - Ability to work with both business and technical representatives at all levels.

· Decision-Making – Ability to make informed balanced decisions in a timely manner.

· Time Management – Ability to manage many initiatives at the same time, and exercise judgment on the most appropriate areas of focus.

· Business – A thorough understanding how technology decisions impact the business as a whole.

 

Desired Qualifications

· Experience in developing event-driven and service-oriented architectures

· Experience with web services, specifically security and identity management

· Experience with various enterprise messaging technologies

· Experience with Enterprise Service Bus solutions

· Experience with Rich Internet Application using AJAX/AHAH and Flash

· Experience building/integrating with Web content management systems

· Experience in e-commerce.

· Experience with commercial supply chain, trading partner, warehouse, logistics management, marketing, and/or customer relationship management (CRM) software.

· Experience with Oracle, JDA, E.piphany, Red Prairie, WebLogic