Solutions Architect

Architectural Strategies Definition

• Provides architectural guidance on solution design and integration strategies, in the form of standards documentation, examples, training and consultancy.
• Works with other Solutions Design Team members to encourage a common approach across projects with regard to patterns, principles, practices, processes, and technologies. Identifies opportunities to improve/refine these and harvest artifacts and patterns used on specific projects for general use.
• Participates in governance/stewardship of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) artifacts and definitions, including enterprise services, enterprise data, business events/topics, contracts and associated publish/subscribe participants.
• Participates in recommendations on platforms, technologies and tools.

Solutions Design and Implementation

• Participates in discussions with Business Analysts and domain experts to determine requirements and model business processes.
• Assesses architectural requirements/constraints such as security, scalability, performance, availability, and redundancy. Ensures requirements can be met at an acceptable cost and with acceptable tradeoffs.
• Ensures physical and logical designs fit within our enterprise architectural framework and conforms to accepted architectural standards.
• Identifies necessary interactions with other applications/services and defines message exchange patterns, data contracts, and service-level agreements (SLA).
• Formulates evolves pattern-based designs appropriate for the solution with a clear separation of concerns, e.g. presentation and data access patterns, service/application layers, domain model, infrastructure services, etc. Grows and evolves the design, ensuring the integrity of the design is maintained over the course of a project.
• Communicates and socializes the design across the team and fosters an environment of shared goals, collective ownership, and collaboration in building a design strategy.
• Encourages adoption and adherence to good development practices such as well factored, ‘intention revealing’ code, comprehensive automated tests, frequent check-ins, continuous integration, collaboration, continuous review/feedback, etc.
• Coaches and mentors developers on project team on design/implementation approaches and techniques.
• Writes code and critiques developers’ code.
• Ensures designs and implementations fulfill not only functional needs but also non-functional needs such as maintainability, pluggability, extendibility, testability, stability, configurability and supportability.
• Produces additional technical documentation such as high-level design, support documentation and data dictionaries, based on need and value. Ensures all artifacts are placed under version control and organized in accordance with agreed standards.
• Assists in the accomplishment of Insperity Company goals.
• Helps other employees to accomplish Insperity Company goals.
• Performs other duties as may be assigned by department supervisor.
• Participates in the Disaster Recovery plan as required.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field (or equivalent work experience) is required.
• Five or more years of professional experience is required.
• Solid grasp of design patterns and principles, particularly Object-Oriented Design (OOD), Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA).
• Deep understanding of architectural concepts and the fundamentals of good software design
• Ability to deliver innovative solutions and to make sound qualitative judgments on appropriateness and effectiveness of solution approaches. 
• Expertise in C# and VB.NET.
• Broad knowledge and experience of Microsoft development technologies, particularly .NET Framework, WCF, WF, WPF, XAML, Silverlight, LINQ, ADO.NET Entity Framework, ASP.NET, and Visual Studio Team System.
• Good working knowledge of JavaScript/AJAX/jQuery, HTML, XML and XSLT.
• Good working knowledge of SQL Server, SQL language, and relational concepts.
• Familiarity with Unified Modeling Language (UML).
• Knowledge of ancillary technologies in use at Insperity, such as Java, PowerBuilder, IBM Informix, Informatica and WebFOCUS, or an ability to quickly learn any of these if needed.
• Strong teamwork and collaborative skills.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, with an ability to express complex technical concepts in business terms.
• Communicates tactfully and effectively and maintains positive and effective work relations with those encountered in the course of employment.
• Possesses a strong customer service attitude.
• Exhibits a passion for learning and continuous improvement. Takes responsibility for acquiring new skills and broadening knowledge
• Exhibits a commitment to the utilization of defined standards and processes.