Position: Solutions Architect
Client : IMF
Rate : $80/hr on C2C
Work Auth - USC, GC or GC- EAD
Location: Washington, DC (metro accessible)
Duration: 6+ month contract
***4 days a week onsite required***
JOB DESCRIPTION
The Solutions Architect shall provide subject matter expertise on Design and Architecture and directly contribute to building a technical Blueprint, architecture, and design of enterprise applications. This includes collaborating with application, data, infrastructure, and security architects to develop a cohesive enterprise application architecture strategy which will rationalize and guide the implementation, integration, and management of solutions. Architect will be developing a direction for the new lending solution - including systems (meaning not just applications, but also processes and information), shared infrastructure services, and shared application services and components to better match business objectives.
Skills Requirements:

• 10+ years of experience in architecting complex applications.
• Experience with IT projects in the Financial Industry.
• Experience with IT projects utilizing multiple technologies and frameworks, particularly Agile/hybrid Agile.
• Deep knowledge and experience of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platforms and services in an enterprise environment. Experience with IaaS/PaaS cloud architectures and patterns (e.g., horizontal scaling, immutability, 12-factor design).
• Prior experience with leading cloud native solution development initiatives.
• Experience with delivering effective strategies for cloud integration.
• Experience designing and implementing CI/CD toolchains leveraging Microsoft TFS, Git/SVN, Chef, Jenkins, etc. Experience with cloud infrastructure and application templates (e.g. using AWS Cloud Formation, Azure Resource Manager).
• Familiarity with micro-frontends, implementing microservices and container-based architectures and deployments (e.g. Docker, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes).
• Prior success in designing cloud applications, supporting changes to development, testing, deployment, migration/transformation, and configuration management processes consistent with a DevOps approach.
• Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills, including the ability to define technology roadmaps and evaluate total-cost-of-ownership of solutions.
• Experience evaluating cloud service designs and alternatives to achieve desired balance of performance, risk, and cost.
• Familiarity with deployment patterns/strategy (blue/green, canary, rolling, draining).
• Experience managing programs and/or multiple projects, including simultaneous task assignments.
• Strong teamwork and interpersonal skills and the ability to communicate with all management levels.
• Strong documentation, analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Organized, agile, persistent, and proactive. Ability to work on multiple tasks within tight deadlines.
• Ability to learn new technologies quickly, self-starters and motivated, and able to work with others, and communicate effectively.
• Actively seeks knowledge needed to complete assignments and shares knowledge with others, communicating and presenting information in a clear and organized manner.
• Delivers information effectively in support of team or workgroup. Good writing and editing skills, with a strong command of English and an ability to convey complex ideas in a clear, direct, and lively format.
• Able to take personal responsibility and accountability for timely response to client queries, requests or needs, working to remove obstacles that may impede execution or overall success.
• Strong experience in Modern Integration - cloud and in-premise and/or hybrid, APIs, and ESB/SOA; and Data/Dataflow governance, strategy, & implementation

Job Duties:

• Lead design for project; develop and maintain core architectural constructs, provide architectural leadership to relevant teams from various location across the globe.
• Communicate critical technical choices, specify requirements and constraints for design and implementation, and provide input for scoping the level effort for the project.
• Provide a long-term vision for the platform, considering changes in technology within the context of IT Dept current implementation and our feature roadmap.
• Advise on deployment strategies for new features and components, assessing if rollout plans are safe, progressive, and reversible.
• In-depth understanding of the business environment, its processes and complexities of the organization and apply the knowledge towards the proposed work program.
• Design and validate solutions that are practical, flexible, resilient, scalable, reusable, and strategic.
• Contribute to the development of a body of generally applicable frameworks, methods, procedures, and deliverables.
• Recognize and identify potential areas where existing policies and procedures require change, or where new ones need to be developed, especially regarding future business expansion.
• Present, discuss, and walk through the merits of the solutions recommendations with a group of enterprise architects.
• Institute and lead the adoption of best practices and standards, to improve the quality of the deliverables.
• Ensure best practices are adhered to in the adoption of new technologies.
• Architect solutions across multiple IT environments and Business system components, envision solution for projects/programs/applications.
• Research, evaluate, and select from existing and emerging technologies the options best fitting business and IT strategic needs.
• Interact with the Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Platform teams to ensure that solutions are built in adherence with the defined enterprise standards.
• Manage daily technical challenges and communicate with management if there are any risks or issues.
• Well-versed in the latest technologies and tools being used to improve IT development and delivery.
• Coordinate effort within different IT groups like Enterprise Architecture, Office of Information Security, Data Management Office as and when needed.
• Understanding of security best practices and standards.
• Work with stakeholders to offer contextualized technology strategies, solutions and roadmaps which are aligned to their business needs.
• Document key artifacts related to application environments, integration platforms, data flows, application inventories, entity-relationships, and process workflows.
• Help build supporting frameworks for on-premises, mobile, cloud-native and hybrid solution architecture approaches and implementations aligned with specific business application requirements and constraints.
• Identify the area in the architecture and design that are contributing towards technical Debt and provide recommendations to remediate same.
• Work with enterprise architecture team to align various solutions architecture to enterprise standard, reference architecture, patterns, and best practices.
• Identify technology trends which have the potential to accelerate the use of innovative digital platforms and/or hosting solutions.
• Developing target-state guidance (reusable standards, guidelines, individual parts, and configurations) for evolving the technical infrastructure across the enterprise, to enable business strategy and deliver business outcomes.