Architect

**Grow your career with a growing organization**

Whether they’re helping people reach their long-term financial goals or providing personal wealth management strategies, every associate contributes to changing the lives of those we serve for the better. When it comes to job satisfaction, that’s hard to beat. And from a personal satisfaction perspective, you’ll enjoy the freedom to support causes that matter to you and experience a truly inclusive work environment. Your future starts now.

**Job Summary**:
In this rapid paced environment, the person must possess a "can-do" attitude while demonstrating a strong work ethic. This person should have a strong aptitude to help drive decisions. He or she will be actively involved in influencing the strategic direction of technology at Empower Retirement. There will be collaboration across all teams including IT Infrastructure, PMO office, Business, and third-party integrators in reviewing, evaluating, designing and implementing solutions.

The Architect must understand available technology options and educate and influence technology teams to leverage them where appropriate. The Architect will recognize and propose alternatives, make recommendations, and describe any necessary trade-offs. In some cases, particularly on key initiatives, the Architect will participate on the design and implementation of end-to-end solutions directly with development teams.

**Responsibilities**:

- Help Sr. Architects and peers define and execute on the business aligned IT strategy and vision.
- Develop, document, and provide input into the technology roadmap for Empower Retirement and Great West Financial.
- Create Reference Architectures that demonstrate an understanding of technology components and the relationships between them.
- Adopt best practices for microservices to deliver solutions.
- Ensure that IT understands how to leverage various integration protocols and technologies, such as REST & resource-oriented design, OData and API Gateways.
- Implement best practices, standards & guidance, then subsequently provide coaching of technology team members.
- Make leadership recommendations regarding strategic architectural considerations related to process design and process orchestration.
- Collaborate with other business and technology teams on architecture and design issues.
- Respond to evolving and changing security conditions. Implement and recommend security guidelines.
- Provide thought-leadership, advocacy, articulation, assurance and maintenance of the Enterprise Architecture discipline.
- Provide solution, guidance, and implementation assistance within Full stack development teams.
- Have experience working with high throughput high concurrency distributed systems to meet latency in single digit milli seconds with 4 9s (99.99) availability.
- Have worked with modern testing tools like Gatling or similar to test peak performance of APIs.
- Good understanding of horizontal elastic scaling on cloud for compute and data stores including caching technologies like Redis or Memcache.

**Preferred Qualifications**:

- 5+ years of experience in the development and delivery of software systems.
- 3+ years of experience developing in the following technologies: Java (Spring, SpringBoot), Web Services (JSON/XML), RESTful architectures, AWS API Gateway, Lambda, NodeJS, Python.
- Solid experience with one or more of the following technology disciplines: SOA & Microservices design, Cloud Architectures,, Advanced Programming, Modern Integration Methods (API Gateway/Web Services, Messaging & RESTful architectures), NoSQL
- Client-side Development experience in Web and/or Mobile technologies.
- Good understanding of front-end and web frameworks such as React and Angular and how they integrate with APIs and backend services.
- Experienced in modern deployment models using Jenkins and CI/CD pipelines.
- Proficient with source code version control such as GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket
- Working knowledge of addressing architectural cross cutting concerns and their tradeoffs, including topics such as caching, monitoring, operational surround, high availability, security, etc.
- Strong knowledge of data modeling, security patterns and integration methods.
- Experience with DevOps processes and tools.
- Understanding of business process analysis and business process management (BPM).
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Demonstrates continuous learning of new technologies.
- Self-motivated individual that thrives in a team environment.
- Financial industry expertise preferred (Investments, Asset Management, etc.).
- Understanding of machine learning algorithms, deep learning frameworks, and AI model architectures.
- Understanding of ethical AI principles and practices.
- Experience implementing AI transparency and explainability techniques.

Technology skills are not the only skills needed. There are other skills that are highly desirable in the Architect, including:

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