Senior Solutions Architect

Position Purpose : The Software Engineering Solutions Architect leverages enterprise architecture techniques, software engineering principles, expertise, and team management experience to design scalable, secure, and highly reliable solutions using systems and software developed by Benchmark’s Software Engineering department. Benchmark Education builds software to meet the challenges facing literacy learners and teachers. Our software enables and supports a wide range of next generation learning experiences with the promise of doing even more with the right technology team members. The Software Engineering Solutions Architect defines technical systems and software solutions for customer facing and backend systems implemented by internal BEC teams or development partner teams using a variety of technologies. Job Responsibilities: Leadership Develops a highly performing Solutions Architecture team to design and guide development of Benchmark Education’s software applications and solutions Establish the processes and practices for Solutions Architecture Recruit, train, develop, and mentor Solutions Architecture staff Provides support through practical application of Solution Architecture responsibilities Strategy Ensures the logical and systematic conversion of business, customer and product requirements into flexible, scalable, and high-performance technical solutions which support current and future needs. Performs functional analysis, timeline analysis, tradeoff, capacity modeling and interface definition studies to formalize customer requirements into solution architecture specifications. Architecture Successfully manage interactions with many constituents including senior business and IT leaders, end business users, application development teams, and operational teams to clarify requirements. Define high -level solution architectures that prioritize scalability, fault tolerance, and security, and breaking them down to detailed designs which support all requirements and can be implemented by development teams and managed by operational teams. Defines in written documents non-functional requirements (availability, reliability, scalability interoperability, portability, manageability, scalability, maintainability, security, monitoring, SLAs, KPIs, regulatory and legal compliance) based on business vision, best practices, and company architectural direction. Ensures that all architectures support high availability, disaster recovery, and performance optimization, particularly for distributed systems Balances a variety of competing goals in a design, including project time, scope and budget constraints, system performance, message verbosity, and loose coupling. Assists with writing and communicating best practices, standards, and guidelines documents that support Technology teams. Evaluate, define, and when necessary prototype alternative solutions to determine the most appropriate approach. Research & Best Practices Evaluates and applies best practices for designing highly scalable distributed solutions, leveraging cloud-native technologies where applicable. Keeps up on industry trends and current technological standards and best practices.  Assists with assessment of industry standards for information models and their applicability. Drives adoption of identified design patterns, standards, techniques, principles, products, methodologies, and best practices throughout the software engineering organization. Project Leadership Serves as a technical advisor on IT projects.  Ensures that IT projects adhere to the principles, guidelines and standards established by the company. Accountable for guiding and modeling the technical implementation of shared artifacts, deployment models, and applications in their entirety—from interfaces, business logic, data, security, and network, and infrastructure. Maintains ongoing communication with project teams, verifying that what was designed was built and adjusting solution architecture as appropriate throughout the project. Ensures short-term project goals align to the company architecture plans to maintain balance with long-term strategy. Conceptualizes and articulates alternatives to problem resolution. Builds consensus across stakeholder groups including management and individual contributors. Job Requirements/Skills and Experience: Education, Experience and Knowledge Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline, 8 or more years of related experience, or equivalent combination of education and experience.  Experience in the development of high volume, mission critical applications in heterogeneous environments/architectures for multi-user solutions Demonstrated experience designing or building highly scalable distributed solutions capable of handling large-scale workloads Experience developing solutions that satisfy security, scalability, high availability, and network management/monitoring requirements. Experience with relational and/or non-relational (NoSQL) databases and the design of highly available, distributed database applications. Experience with Service Oriented Architecture concepts, web/RESTful services, and event-driven architecture. Experience in all aspects of the software development lifecycle: design, functional and technical requirements, coding, debugging, testing, release, and operational support. Knowledge of Agile/Scrum development methodologies Skills Excellent oral, written, presentation and listening communication skills. Excellent interpersonal, persuasion and diplomatic skills. Excellent reasoning, analytical, and problem-solving skills. Strong skills in a broad set of development technologies:  Java, PHP, Web Services, RESTful Services, JavaScript, HTML, scripting languages, etc.              Abilities Ability to develop technical specifications, designs, and architecture artifacts. Ability to take ownership of an assignment t