Principal Architect

DESCRIPTION:

Enterprise Architecture is a critical element to achieving greater efficiency, scale, digital transformation and innovation of Neiman Marcus’ business application portfolio—now and into the future. The Principal Architect will be a core member of a next generation Enterprise Architecture practice and is expected to become a trusted advisor for both the IT and the Business leadership teams. The Architect will help drive the development of the future IT landscape, in close collaboration with business leaders, process owners, IT Delivery teams and Solution Architects.

You will provide advice and consulting support to our key stakeholders on strategy, architecture reviews, architecture governance, data governance, and various technology management topics. Working with our product and technology owners, you will design and guide the implementation of business capabilities that enable a frictionless experience for our customers. You will analyze business requirements and ensure that implemented systems are secure and are effectively integrated into our technology eco-system. You will ensure that the technology solutions delivered are aligned to enterprise strategies and adhere to target reference architectures by applying sound architectural principles & best practices and following Neimans’ IT governance processes and guidelines.

The successful candidate will be a high vision, results-driven technologist with extensive experience in digital transformation and legacy system modernization projects who has the ability to zoom in and out within the architectural landscape. Candidate will have demonstrable expertise in cloud architectures, AWS technologies and Microservices with a prior hands-on software engineering background.

PRINCIPAL ACCOUNTABILITIES:

• Designs architectural roadmaps for enterprise capabilities in accordance with enterprise strategies and enterprise architecture principles, partnering with product owners and technology leaders.
• Articulates forward thinking strategies to Senior IT/technology leaders,
• Evaluates technology, security, performance, availability and interoperability requirements and produces high level design deliverables that enable development teams to produce products that are flexible, scalable and secure.
• Champions & leads end-to-end journey to execute blue print & roadmap. Manages life cycle of the technology landscape - research, proof of concepts, software prototyping, vendor evaluation, compatibility tests and analysis, technology introduction, etc.
• Serves as a technical advisor on all technology projects ensuring these projects adhere to the principles, guidelines and standards.
• Identifies necessary non-functional requirements (performance, security, operational concerns) and participates in the development of conceptual architecture.
• Works with other enterprise architecture staff, experts and decision makers to accurately define client requirements; provides ongoing support for data, applications and system client requests.
• Maintains ongoing communication with project teams, verifying that what was designed was built and adjusting the solution architecture as appropriate throughout the project
• Assists with socializing architecture principles and artifacts, and with the promotion of enterprise architecture within the Company
• Delivers innovative strategies to achieve business/partner goals beyond scope of duties
• Balances a variety of competing goals in a design, including project time, scope and budget constraints, and system performance, message verbosity, and loose coupling.
• Plan, organize and lead technology implementation projects, initiatives, and teams. Ensure that all projects are delivered in a timely manner against stated objectives.

KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE GUIDELINES:

• Bachelor Degree in Computer Science or Management from a reputable college is a must (MS preferred).
• Candidate must be current in a senior architecture role within the Enterprise Architecture domain
• Related IT certifications such as Azure or AWS required
• 10+ years overall IT experience as applied to system/application architecture, design, development, deployment, testing and support
• Technology breadth of knowledge must include AWS, integration, information mgmt., applications, business processes, channels and security, configuration & release management, and operational considerations such as monitoring
• Must have a good understanding of business architecture, information architecture, technology architecture and governance
• Must demonstrate in-depth understanding of SOA concepts and technologies, event driven and message-based architectures, file sharing and exchange platforms, data virtualization and caching strategies, J2EE design patterns, frameworks, APIs and microservices architectures
• Understands fundamentals of building composable flexible architectures – creating capabilities as autonomous, loosely coupled components.
• Collaborative, diplomatic and articulate demeanor that encourages broad base acceptance and support of solutions which align with strategic technology direction of the company
• Ability to understand the business goals, keep it simple and have excellent communication skills to discuss with executives, subject matter experts, vendors and customers.
• Experience designing systems for high-performance: high throughput, high-availability, low latency, etc.
• Ability to "think big" and challenge conventional wisdom regarding technology refresh and hype