Solution Engineer

Manifest Solutions is currently seeking a Solution Engineer Lead for an onsite position in Columbus, OH.

• Become the senior technical owner for the business applications portfolio.
• Develop a working understanding of business-critical processes, operating calendars, peak periods, dependencies, and recovery expectations.
• Define sustainable ownership boundaries across internal support teams, business users, infrastructure teams, database teams, and external service providers.
• Serve as the senior technical escalation point for complex incidents, recurring defects, data-quality issues, performance problems, and integration failures.
• Assess the current architecture of data-intensive pricing applications, an enterprise energy-trading and risk-management platform, databases, scheduled processing, interfaces, reports, and supporting tools.
• Establish practical technical standards for maintainability, reliability, security, data integrity, testing, deployment, and recovery.
• Lead the design and implementation of application enhancements, integrations, monitoring, automation, and technical-debt reduction.
• Review code, stored procedures, configurations, deployment plans, and technical designs produced by internal or external developers.
• Ensure that changes account for upstream data dependencies and downstream pricing, risk, trading, settlement, billing, and reporting impacts.
• Define monitoring, alerting, support, and recovery practices for mission-critical application processes.
• Improve visibility into scheduled jobs, interface failures, missing or incomplete data, application health, and processing outcomes.
• Lead root-cause analysis and ensure that recurring incidents result in durable corrective action.
• Establish runbooks, support procedures, recovery steps, and operational acceptance criteria.
• Provide after-hours support leadership when business-critical incidents or operating periods require it.
• Provide technical direction and mentorship to application-support engineers.
• Establish cross-training and backup coverage across Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, application, interface, and scheduled-processing responsibilities.
• Coordinate knowledge transfer from existing business SMEs, technical SMEs, external providers, and contractors.
• Use distributed or external development capacity effectively while retaining internal accountability for architecture, quality, and production outcomes.
• Build a support model that can maintain and enhance the applications without depending indefinitely on individual experts or external intervention.
• Lead technical planning for packaged-application upgrades and future application-lifecycle decisions.
• Coordinate with external providers on defects, patches, supported versions, technical limitations, and product roadmaps.
• Support the transition to a SaaS platform where technical leadership, integration knowledge, or transition coordination is needed.
• Evaluate longer-term modernization opportunities without disrupting critical business operations.
• Demonstrated experience leading technical design, complex troubleshooting, application modernization, and production recovery.
• Ability to provide technical direction without relying on formal reporting authority.
• Experience mentoring developers, reviewing technical work, and establishing engineering standards.
• Sound judgment about when to repair, enhance, modernize, replace, or escalate an application or component.
• Own technical architecture and engineering direction for the application portfolio.
• Lead complex production incident diagnosis, recovery, root-cause analysis, and corrective-action planning.
• Establish and maintain technical standards for development, testing, deployment, monitoring, security, documentation, and support.
• Lead technical knowledge transfer and ensure effective primary and backup coverage for critical applications and processes.
• Design or oversee application enhancements, integrations, data validations, automated controls, and performance improvements.
• Review source code, stored procedures, configurations, deployment packages, technical designs, and externally produced changes.
• Establish monitoring and alerting for application failures, scheduled processes, interfaces, incomplete data, and abnormal processing results.
• Develop and maintain architecture diagrams, technical documentation, support runbooks, recovery procedures, and dependency records.
• Coordinate releases, upgrades, patches, environment changes, rollback plans, and production validation.
• Lead technical interactions with packaged-software providers, custom-development partners, market-data services, SaaS platforms, and other external technology partners.
• Partner with business leaders and SMEs to prioritize production needs, risks, improvements, and enhancements.
• Coordinate with enterprise architecture, infrastructure, database, identity and access, cybersecurity, service management, and release teams.
• Promote compliance with change-management, access-control, audit, security, and applicable regulatory requirements.
• Mentor application-support engineers and help build a collaborative, accountable, and cross-trained team.
• Support Choice and adjacent retail-energy platforms when required for continuity, integration troubleshooting, or transition work.

Minimum Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical field. An equivalent combination of education and relevant experience may be considered.
• 10+ years of relevant software development, application engineering, integration, or production-support experience, including demonstrated technical leadership of complex enterprise applications.
• Advanced relational-database and SQL experience, with significant experience in SQL Server/T-SQL, Oracle/SQL, or comparable enterprise database technologies.
• Experience designing, supporting, or troubleshooting data-intensive applications and scheduled processing.
• Experience with application integrations, REST APIs, file exchanges, and data interfaces.
• Experience with at least one enterprise development technology such as C#/.NET or Java.
• Experience with source control, CI/CD, release management, testing, environment promotion, and rollback.
• Experience leading high-severity incident response and root-cause analysis.
• Experience producing technical documentation, architecture diagrams, operating procedures, and support runbooks.
• Ability to provide after-hours production support when business-critical needs require it.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with an enterprise energy-trading, risk-management, or commodity-management platform.
• Experience supporting energy pricing, risk, trading, scheduling, settlement, or billing processes.
• Experience with Azure, Azure DevOps, GitHub, IIS, Power Automate, or related enterprise technologies.
• Experience managing technical work performed by external providers, contractors, or distributed development teams.
• Relevant cloud, database, software-engineering, ITIL, or DevOps certifications.

Competencies

• Technical Leadership: Establishes direction, makes sound technical decisions, and guides others through complex work.
• Operational Ownership: Accepts accountability for system reliability, incident response, recovery, and continuous improvement.
• Systems Thinking: Understands how applications, data, integrations, people, controls, and business processes affect one another.
• Problem Solving: Diagnoses complex issues using evidence, identifies root causes, and implements durable solutions.
• Risk Awareness: Recognizes production, data, security, compliance, external-dependency, and continuity risks before they become incidents.
• Communication: Explains complex technical issues clearly and adapts communication to the audience.
• Collaboration: Builds productive relationships across business, technology, provider, and leadership teams.
• Mentorship: Develops technical capability in others and promotes documentation, cross-training, and shared ownership.
• Adaptability: Works effectively across packaged applications, custom software, legacy components, SaaS solutions, and evolving business priorities.

Technologies and Tools

• Databases and Data: Microsoft SQL Server, T-SQL, stored procedures, Oracle, SQL, data reconciliation, data validation, and performance tuning.
• Applications: Data-intensive pricing solutions and enterprise energy-trading, risk-management, or commodity-management platforms.
• Development and Integration: C#/.NET, Java, REST APIs, IIS, scheduled and batch processing, and file/SFTP interfaces.
• Cloud and DevOps: Microsoft Azure, Azure DevOps, GitHub or Git, CI/CD pipelines, automated deployment, and rollback.
• Automation and Operations: Monitoring and alerting tools, job scheduling, workflow automation, and IT service-management tools.
• Business Interfaces: Excel-based operational tools, pricing templates, data feeds, reports, and reconciliation processes.
• Adjacent Platforms: SaaS solutions, retail-energy platforms, market-data services, and other externally managed applications.