• Provides overarching architectural leadership across a portfolio of related applications, partnering with application architects, site reliability engineers, and delivery teams to maintain technical alignment and departmental consistency.
• Establishes and sustains the overall architecture practice, design standards, reference patterns, and a shared design language, and captures decisions as Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) maintained in source control.
• Serves as a consulting architect to delivery teams: reviews designs, facilitates architectural decisions, and guides teams toward pragmatic solutions rather than owning delivery for them.
• Owns and continuously improves the developer experience, identifying and removing technology and process impediments at the team level so engineers can do their best work.
• Builds bridges across organizational boundaries, aligning groups that plan, prioritize, and deliver work differently toward shared technical outcomes.
• Develops durable partnerships with infrastructure and platform teams, understanding their priorities and constraints and aligning delivery and platform roadmaps so teams are unblocked rather than escalated around.
• Leads adoption of AI-assisted engineering practices across development roles, serving as a power user, setting expectations for responsible use, and coaching teams on where AI adds leverage.
• Drives cost optimization for both application and platform spend, making architectural trade-offs with total cost of ownership in view.
• Identifies, quantifies, and sequences technical debt remediation and post-implementation cleanup as an explicit part of the delivery plan.
• Provides architectural leadership during incident management and post-incident review, ensuring systemic causes are addressed at the design level.
• Understands the business domain of products supported and the business drivers behind the work, so teams understand the “why” behind technical direction.
• Ensures technology solution architecture and design principles are aligned with NDS IT Delivery technology direction.
• Knowledgeable of all existing services, components and technologies to ensure maximum technology reuse.
• Understands and exhibits skills to protect data, systems and networks and maintains secure, reliable, redundant, and accessible systems.
• Independently identifies and pursues opportunities to improve solution architecture across the enterprise.
• Engages with Agile teams to deliver high quality, working software solutions in alignment with team commitments.
• Explores and pursues technical skills outside of current job family; actively seeks to remain technically current and increase expertise and abilities.
• Strives to align personal passion and career desires with opportunities and company needs.
• Works in concert with Solution Architects to drive Nelnet technology solution architecture.