Solutions Architect - REI Systems

REI is looking for an experienced Solutions Architect to provide technical thought leadership and management of a complex program. Successful candidates will be able to support REI's growth strategy, competence development, and capacity building endeavors. The position enables REI to meet near-term new business goals through a combination of competitive and noncompetitive pursuits. It also contributes toward REI's long-term strategy to organically acquire and retain customers and talent and, expand its portfolio of offerings to create new customers.

Key Result Areas and Activities:

Develop Persuasive and Competitive Solutions for REI's Growth (Capture/Proposals)

• Support decision-making for lead identification and qualification
• Support captures across REI's offerings
• Develop competitive solutions as part of approved captures (proposition, plans, people, products, past performance, pricing)
• Convey REI's UVP and USP for the capture/opportunity to internal advocates/partner/customer
• Lead competitive proposals (contributing, writing, reviewing)
• Support organic proposals (contributing, writing, reviewing)
• Support team challenges as needed
• Work within the constraints of RFPs
• Represent REI's complete suite of offerings and competencies in the market

Identify and Exploit New Technologies for New and Existing Clients (Technology, Process, Tools, Platforms, Standards) 

• Understand, contribute to, and maintain technology radars in relevant context (market, accounts, portfolios)
• Experience in aligning strategy and technology to meet organizational business objectives.
• Presents proposals to senior government officials or technical governance board in a clear and compelling way
• Recommend pragmatic adoption strategies
• Contribute to REI's Process Asset Library
• Expertise in Application standardization, rationalization, and strategy decomposition.
• Analyze available technologies and makes recommendations of technologies to use and how best to use them
• Present advice inside and outside REI
• Provide robust recommendations for engagements while identifying critical dependencies and gaps

Technical Leadership in Enterprise Agile Environment (Delivery/Value Creation)

• Provide technical thought leadership for Agile development teams, ensuring successful software development projects and use case implementations
• Champion the adoption of development best practices and identify. Adapt to different priorities and communication styles while maintaining high level of productivity
• Strong execution skill to take ideas from inception to implementation, overseeing all stages of project lifecycle. Highlight the challenges, form alliance to overcome issue and achieve positive results
• Spearhead proof-of-concept (POC) initiatives in various areas, driving innovation and identifying viable solutions
• Foster a culture of excellence by actively directing and mentoring development teams, maximizing their potential
• Experience in multi-vendor environment, presenting solutions with authority and accountability to large audience. Understand other vendors’ strengths and weaknesses
• Architect and design robust AWS deployment architectures, infrastructure selection, benchmarking, cost estimates ensuring scalability and efficiency
• Deliver a comprehensive multi-year roadmap that outlines a clear path for continuous value creation
• Collaborate with internal REI teams, customer teams and other vendor POCs

Develop Capacity and Build Talent for REI (People, CoPs, CoEs) 

• Support recruiting and retention of relevant talent
• Run and/or participate in a COP or COE to share lessons learned/best practices
• Coach, mentor, and develop talent including challenge teams
• Build a network of key people carrying core and emerging competencies in the company
• Provide expertise to customers/teams without becoming a key resource

Support Business Strategy for the Organization (Innovation, Priorities) 

• Develop solutions for jobs to be done
• Incubate new competencies
• Drive innovation backlog
• Contribute to REI's strategy
• Strengthen partnerships
• Deliver to the approved budget for competencies

Work and Technical Experience: 

• Technical delivery experience in software development or analytic platform teams
• Leadership experience in software development or analytic teams
• Experience in end-to-end solution development lifecycle and agile methodologies
• Expertise in either business applications, content management or analytics
• Expertise in one or more modern technologies to include cloud, mobile, platforms (BPM, Low-Code, or CRM), and databases
• Experience in one or more technologies including Open Source, .NET, Java, Appian, JavaScript, AngularJS, Node JS
• 8+ years’ experience in one or more architecture domains (e.g. business architecture, solutions architecture, application architecture, security architecture, data architecture)
• Extensive experience in using major cloud platforms (AWS preferred) to build, design, architect, deploy cloud native applications.

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or related field (Master's degree is a plus)
• Demonstrated continued learning through one or more technical certifications or related methods
• 12+ years of comprehensive experience in architecting sustainable enterprise scale architectures, cloud applications and solutions, enterprise systems modernization, cloud-native architectures, microservices architecture and containerized applications

Qualities: 

• Self-motivated and focused on delivering outcomes
• Able to meet proposal deadlines for the team
• Able to write and present persuasively
• Able to communicate with different stakeholders (both technical and business)
• Able to work in a self-organized and cross-functional team
• Able to iterate based on new information, peer reviews, and feedback
• Effectively resolve conflict between team members and ensure everyone is aligned on the program goal

Clearance:  Public Trust clearance needed