Architect II
AF Group

Job Info

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The Architect II assists in creation of best practices and is responsible for designing and effectively implementing AWS strategies and solutions in alignment with IT strategy and guidelines. This position assists in the development of actionable AWS blueprints, principles, models, designs, standards, and guidelines for assigned projects/initiatives to ensure information technology architecture is consistent, usable, secure and adds value to the business. The position helps facilitate design and implementation of flexible, scalable, and cost-effective AWS solutions and provides technical guidance to subordinate group.

• Accountable for adhering to corporate architecture standards, ensuring technology standards and best practices are maintained across the organization and contributing to corporate architecture strategy-setting.
• Participates in formulating solution estimates and work planning including determining appropriate task sequencing and identification of technical skill sets required.
• Builds consensus around principles of infrastructure architecture and interprets and clarifies these principles.
• Participates in the evaluation, selection and implementation of AWS technology solutions including providing detailed analysis of pros and cons.
• Maintains operational, architectural and design documentation including procedures, task lists, and reference architecture.
• Evaluates strengths and flaws in infrastructure design including performance, quality, availability, simplicity of design, security, and total cost of ownership.
• Assists in the facilitation of project handoffs including preparing documentation, educating, and supporting to ensure smooth transitions.
• Establishes and maintains relationships with IT and business area partners and provides consultation to the business teams.
• Troubleshoots, recommends, and executes action plans for issue resolution.
• Selects and designs tools that allow reuse of design components and patterns between projects.
• Continually works to enhance breadth and depth of knowledge and experience. Benchmarks technology strategies and architectures. Monitors and anticipates trends and investigates organizational objectives and needs. Prepares bench marking reports and presentations.
• Promotes implementation of new technology, solutions, and methods to improve business processes, efficiency, effectiveness, and value delivered to customers.
• Develops actual working solutions or prototypes based on their own designs and resolves any issues that arise.
• Stays updated on current technology trends and industry best practices.
• Provides technical leadership and works effectively with different teams including Product Managers, Project Managers, and Engineers.
• Fosters a healthy, collaborative, and productive scrum team culture.
• Works with other leads in a project setting to define and execute a software architecture that is sustainable, flexible, and scalable.
• Leads key initiative design, highly capable to complete tasks both independently with minimal guidance and leading a team technically.
• Exchanges information clearly and precisely, in verbal or written form, by sharing ideas, reporting facts and other information, responding to questions, and employing active listening techniques.
• Works with networks and understands internet security protocols. Analyze existing systems to ensure adequate security and business continuality.
• Routing technologies including TCP, UDP, IP, AWS VPC route tables, security groups, network ACLs.
• Create designs to support appropriate technology choices
• Create strategy for server & network technologies.
• Promotes and conducts software development best practices such as dependency injection and test-driven development to create high-quality, flexible, scalable applications that can be easily configured for different client needs.
• Assisting in the structuring of data including methods of storing and retrieving data
• Facilitates and creates reporting tools and automating the delivery of reports to dashboards.
• Creates data interfaces and facilitates API extraction of data.
• Design and architect Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions
• Guide project teams with the implementations consistent with company policies and practices
• Align projects with business and IT strategy to help projects sustain alignment with company policy's and standards.
• Write policy and standards as needed to sustain company compliance with regulatory changes.
• Development of product roadmaps and align efforts to meet security goals.

EDUCATION

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related area required. Master's preferred.
• Continuous learning, as defined by the Company's learning philosophy, is required.
• Azure or AWS Solution Architect certification or progress toward certification is highly preferred and encouraged.

EXPERIENCE

• 7+ years' experience in the architecture, design, implementation, and maintenance of enterprise level systems in AWS.
• 5+ years' experience working with VMware virtual environments.
• 8+ years experience with administering Windows Server OS
• 8+ years experience with administering Active Directory, GPO, DNS
• 3+ years experience working with Linux servers
• Experience in a large complex enterprise environment, preferably in Healthcare, Insurance, or similarly government-regulated environment.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Expert knowledge of architectural design including but not limited to AWS VPC, Lambda, API Gateway, IAM, RDS, Route53, EC2, Load Balancers, Organizations, EKS, S3, CloudWatch, Systems Manager, and other AWS serverless platforms
• Strong communication and written skills. Ability to work out differences of opinions and publish scalable and quality system design based on specification.
• Working knowledge of Microservices using Web API, Queue based processing using any messaging technologies such as AWS SQS, RabbitMQ, MSMQ etc.
• Ability to create reference architecture and document designs and requirements.
• Knowledge of Security protocols and the design, integration, and maintenance of these protocols.
• Ability to manage, assess and negotiate with vendors.
• Ability to mentor and lend guidance to team as needed.
• Demonstrated ability to work in teams and capture ideas into strategy and standards.
• Ability to execute governance of cloud standards and strategy.
• Ability to set strategic architectural direction.
• Ability to identify architecture components for reuse.
• A clear understanding of the architecture standards.
• Ability to communicate effectively with Leadership, Business Partners, and IT Infrastructure team.
• Knowledge of IT and IT's priorities, strategies, and current capabilities.
• Knowledge of technology and the current technical environment.
• Ability to breakdown the requirements into projects and determine timelines and dependencies with the other domains/ projects.
• Understanding of ongoing and planned projects and their inter-dependencies/ timelines.
• Strong analytical, problem solving and planning skills.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills.
• Ability to multi-task in a fast-paced environment.
• Flexibility to adapt readily to changing business needs.
• Enthusiastic, can-do attitude with the drive to learn and improve.

Infrastructure:

• Ability to understand networks and internet security protocols. Analyze existing systems to ensure adequate security and business continuality.
• Knowledge of web server and application server administration and web applications deployment.
• Knowledge of server sizing and performance
• Knowledge of network design and performance
• Familiarity of routing technologies such as TCP, UDP, IP
• Knowledge of Firewalls and ACLs
• Knowledge of VMWare ESX and Microsoft Hypervisor
• Expert in Cloud Infrastructure including infrastructure as code (prefer AWS)
• Knowledge of patching and assessment technologies

Data:

• Knowledge data interfaces and API extraction of data.
• Familiarity of data tools such as Data Bricks, PowerBI, ElasticSearch, and SAS
• Knowledge of relational databases such as Amazon RDS, Greenplum, Hadoop, MS SQL, Postgress, MySQL, & Oracle SQL

Identity:

• Ability to design and architect Identity and Access Management solutions.
• Knowledge of IAM tools such as ForgeRock, SailPoint, Oracle Access Manager
• Knowledge of privileged access management experience with tools like Delinea Secret Server
• Strong knowledge of modern Identity Management protocols and standards, frameworks, federation technologies and solutions (for example ADFS, SAML, MFA, LDAP, Service Principals, Azure AD)

WORKING CONDITIONS:

Work is performed in an office setting with no unusual hazards.

The qualifications listed above are intended to represent the minimum education, experience, skills, knowledge and ability levels associated with performing the duties and responsibilities contained in this job description.

Pay Range

Actual compensation decision relies on the consideration of internal equity, candidate's skills and professional experience, geographic location, market and other potential factors. It is not standard practice for an offer to be at or near the top of the range, and therefore a reasonable estimate for this role is between $77,700 and $203,700.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. Diversity is valued and we will not tolerate discrimination or harassment in any form. Candidates for the position stated above are hired on an \"at will\" basis. Nothing herein is intended to create a contract.

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