Director of Enterprise Architecture

About the Role:

We are working on replacing one of our strongest technical leaders from an established food distribution account in Naperville, IL. Success for a candidate interested in this role means becoming an indispensable partner for the Engineering Lead and a trusted advisor to the CIO.

More specifically, this position requires:

(i) a skilled technical leader with a strong focus on both front-end and back-end development;

(ii) a strong management approach, to lead a team of over 30 developers; and

(iii) amazing client hands.

Our ideal candidate will have demonstrated extensive experience in those three areas in the context of developing and maintaining web applications, working with modern technologies, and delivering high-quality solutions.

This is an on-site position (hybrid would be ok, with a minimum of 3-days a week in the office) at the client’s office and will require daily interactions with the on-site leadership team especially their Engineering Lead and their CIO. This role is a blend of critical high-level architectural engineering thinking combined with day-to-day management tasks and teaching and mentoring software

craftsmanship to more junior engineers. This will be about 60% hands-to-keyboard with about 40% being management and mentorship focused. This role will have client account management responsibilities for onshore, nearshore, and offshore engineers on the team they are leading – and be responsible and accountable to ensure that this team is performing, high functioning, and sticky with the client.

Key Responsibilities:

Become a trusted mentor to the Engineering Lead, building a solid relationship that will push the client performance forward:

• Provide thought leadership and become a partner to the Engineering Lead. Problem solve issues and opportunities with the Engineering Lead, advising on alternatives and best course of action.

• Mentor and coach the Engineering Lead on technical and leadership aspects.

• Collaborate with stakeholders, project managers and business analysts to understand project requirements and objectives.

• Develop relationships with key stakeholders within the client organization to identify latent needs and problem solve potential solutions.

• Engage frequently with the client Engineering team to solicit feedback and secure their input on an on-going basis.

Provide architectural expertise and leadership at the enterprise level, bringing innovation and stability to the conversations – and ensuring adoption by the client team:

• Help define the overall structure, integration, and scalability of the clients’ systems to ensure they are aligned with the business requirements and industry best practices.

• Design and oversee the implementation of complex technical solutions for our projects so that they seamlessly integrate with existing systems.

• Coordinate the development, testing, and maintenance of all applications.

• Have a hands-on approach, take the lead in prototyping new ideas and concepts before asking for the client’s buy in.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define, design, and ship new features.

• Implement good design principles, including automated unit testing, static analysis via Sonar, and code coverage.

• Work with PostgreSQL databases to store and retrieve application data and use Datadog to optimize queries.

Manage the team (a combination of employees and nearshore & offshore contractors), building a thriving organization focused on excellence and efficiency that does exceptional work for our client and loves working for The Bridge:

• Oversee the daily operations of our technical team, including defining and monitoring team and individual objectives and milestones while providing technical guidance and oversight throughout the project lifecycle.

• Recruit, train, and develop our technical team, ensuring we are consistently providing a best-in-class experience to our client.

• Develop and share best practices across teams. Ensure that the team continues to develop their technical skills over time.

• Provide feedback to the client team members using the following tools: Code Climate Velocity, GitHub, Slack, Ops Level, OpsGenie, Datadog, SonarQube, Dependabot, Incident Response and Awareness

• Guide the team as a Senior Developer and Team Tech Lead for a B2B distribution company using agile methodology to custom develop and build out retailer, supplier, and internal employee facing platforms

KPIs:

We will measure the success of this position using the following dimensions (all additional metrics will be jointly agreed upon):

• Role transition completed within the first 3 months

• Development of strong relationship with Engineering Lead and CIO (i.e., if asked to remove you from the account, they would quickly say no)

• Identification of most pressing team/performance issues before the client becomes aware of them

• Performance improvement quarter over quarter

Qualifications:

Technical-

• Proven experience as an Enterprise/Technical Architect or similar role, with a minimum of 10+ year’s experience in software design and development. Ideally, we are looking for a highly skilled Enterprise Architect specializing in AWS, serverless technologies such as Lambda Functions, and .NET, with a strong focus on building scalable, efficient applications

• Ability to lead the design, development, and implementation of enterprise-level architecture and solutions, ensuring that applications are scalable, secure, and performant

• Ability to work closely with cross-functional teams to provide technical leadership and direction and to implement best practices in software architecture and development

• Experience with a large real-time distributed system

Core Skills:

• Expertise as a Full Stack Developer and Cloud Engineer/Cloud Architect, designing and building Distributed Systems with Microservices and/or .net web APIs

• Deep understanding of back-end systems using .NET and Entity Framework, as well as front-end development with Angular. Experience with Ops Level, DataDog, Sonar, Code Climate Velocity, Terraform, and Test-Driven Development (TDD) is highly desirable.

• Expertise in various programming languages, frameworks and technologies used (.Net Core, C#, Linq Expressions, Angular with NgRx, Java, React, or Blazor, ext.)

Experience with:

▪ Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices.

▪ Entity Framework Core and EF Migrations

▪ Postgres and Querying Jsonb data fields

▪ MSTest and MOQ

▪ Serverless Framework

▪ AWS Lambda Functions, SNS Topics, and API Gateway

▪ CQRS Pattern

▪ SOLID Design Principles

Leadership:

• Off-the-charts accountability to drive consistent results and lead our team

• Very strong leadership skills and technical management skills to attract, retain, lead, grow, and develop a large team of onshore, nearshore, and offshore engineers

• Executive acumen and consulting engagement leadership skills to maintain existing and build new relationships with client’s organization (including C-Level executives and their direct reports)

• Consulting experience would be a huge plus, but a consulting mindset is a must; we are looking for someone with amazing client hands

• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to think strategically and anticipate future technical needs

• Curiosity and desire to continuously learn to stay up-to-date with management practices and emerging technologies, applying that improve the relationship with the client