Senior Solutions Architect

Software Engineering Solutions Architect

The Software Engineering Solutions Architect leverages enterprise architecture techniques, software engineering principles, expertise, and team management experience to design scalable, secure, and highly reliable solutions using systems and software developed by Benchmark's Software Engineering department. Benchmark Education builds software to meet the challenges facing literacy learners and teachers. Our software enables and supports a wide range of next generation learning experiences with the promise of doing even more with the right technology team members. The Software Engineering Solutions Architect defines technical systems and software solutions for customer facing and backend systems implemented by internal BEC teams or development partner teams using a variety of technologies.

Job Responsibilities

Leadership

• Develops a highly performing Solutions Architecture team to design and guide development of Benchmark Education's software applications and solutions
• Establish the processes and practices for Solutions Architecture
• Recruit, train, develop, and mentor Solutions Architecture staff
• Provides support through practical application of Solution Architecture responsibilities

Strategy

• Ensures the logical and systematic conversion of business, customer and product requirements into flexible, scalable, and high-performance technical solutions which support current and future needs.
• Performs functional analysis, timeline analysis, tradeoff, capacity modeling and interface definition studies to formalize customer requirements into solution architecture specifications.

Architecture

• Successfully manage interactions with many constituents including senior business and IT leaders, end business users, application development teams, and operational teams to clarify requirements.
• Define high-level solution architectures that prioritize scalability, fault tolerance, and security, and breaking them down to detailed designs which support all requirements and can be implemented by development teams and managed by operational teams.
• Defines in written documents non-functional requirements (availability, reliability, scalability interoperability, portability, manageability, scalability, maintainability, security, monitoring, SLAs, KPIs, regulatory and legal compliance) based on business vision, best practices, and company architectural direction.
• Ensures that all architectures support high availability, disaster recovery, and performance optimization, particularly for distributed systems
• Balances a variety of competing goals in a design, including project time, scope and budget constraints, system performance, message verbosity, and loose coupling.
• Assists with writing and communicating best practices, standards, and guidelines documents that support Technology teams.
• Evaluate, define, and when necessary prototype alternative solutions to determine the most appropriate approach.

Research & Best Practices

• Evaluates and applies best practices for designing highly scalable distributed solutions, leveraging cloud-native technologies where applicable.
• Keeps up on industry trends and current technological standards and best practices. Assists with assessment of industry standards for information models and their applicability.
• Drives adoption of identified design patterns, standards, techniques, principles, products, methodologies, and best practices throughout the software engineering organization.

Project Leadership

• Serves as a technical advisor on IT projects. Ensures that IT projects adhere to the principles, guidelines and standards established by the company.
• Accountable for guiding and modeling the technical implementation of shared artifacts, deployment models, and applications in their entirety—from interfaces, business logic, data, security, and network, and infrastructure.
• Maintains ongoing communication with project teams, verifying that what was designed was built and adjusting solution architecture as appropriate throughout the project.
• Ensures short-term project goals align to the company architecture plans to maintain balance with long-term strategy.
• Conceptualizes and articulates alternatives to problem resolution.
• Builds consensus across stakeholder groups including management and individual contributors.

Job Requirements/Skills and Experience

Education, Experience and Knowledge

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline, 8 or more years of related experience, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Experience in the development of high volume, mission critical applications in heterogeneous environments/architectures for multi-user solutions
• Demonstrated experience designing or building highly scalable distributed solutions capable of handling large-scale workloads
• Experience developing solutions that satisfy security, scalability, high availability, and network management/monitoring requirements.
• Experience with relational and/or non-relational (NoSQL) databases and the design of highly available, distributed database applications.
• Experience with Service Oriented Architecture concepts, web/RESTful services, and event-driven architecture.
• Experience in all aspects of the software development lifecycle: design, functional and technical requirements, coding, debugging, testing, release, and operational support.
• Knowledge of Agile/Scrum development methodologies

Skills

• Excellent oral, written, presentation and listening communication skills.
• Excellent interpersonal, persuasion and diplomatic skills.
• Excellent reasoning, analytical, and problem-solving skills.
• Strong skills in a broad set of development technologies: Java, PHP, Web Services, RESTful Services, JavaScript, HTML, scripting languages, etc.

Abilities

• Ability to develop technical specifications, designs, and architecture artifacts.
• Ability to take ownership of an assignment through to completion and work effectively with people from different departments, companies, and customer organizations.
• Ability to solve complex problems with multiple complex abstract variables.
• Ability to communicate technical information in an appropriate manner for widely varied audiences (from senior management to individual contributors on software development teams).

Leadership

• Courage to push difficult or unpopular perspectives.
• Ability to explain complex technical issues in a way non-technical people understand.
• Self-starter who solves complex technology and operational problems/issues with little to no guidance from senior management. Seeks senior management advice and guidance as needed for critical decisions with broad business exposure and high risk.
• Business/Application Knowledge – demonstrates deep knowledge/expertise in multiple and inter-dependent applications and processes.
• Conduct tradeoff analysis (ability to consider alternative architectural approaches and present pros, cons and recommendations)
• Remains unbiased toward any specific vendor or technology choice; is more interested in results than personal preferences.

Desired

• Experience designing cloud-native architectures using AWS.
• Experience in EdTech, including familiarity with digital learning platforms, assessment tools, or student data systems
• Technical, development, or architectural leadership.
• Experience in Solutions engineering techniques such as architecture modeling, alternative analysis, tradeoff analysis, and portfolio analysis.
• Experience in business process modeling & reengineering.
• Experience in various architecture disciplines like Application, Data, Security and Infrastructure.
• Experience in specifying system performance requirements, network utilization targets, system resource budgets and creating flexible APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).
• Broad understanding of a spectrum of infrastructure technologies including network, hardware and operating systems.
• Advanced knowledge of enterprise application integration patterns.
• Knowledge of Infrastructure-as-a-Service and/or cloud technologies such as Amazon Web Services or Azure.
• Knowledge of relevant security, regulatory, and compliance matters as they relate to system design, e.g., FERPA, COPPA, ESAPI/OWASP, SAML.Understanding of regulatory and compliance considerations in EdTech, such as FERPA, COPPA, or accessibility standards.

About Benchmark Education Company

Benchmark Education Company (BEC) is a leading publisher of core, supplemental, and intervention literacy and language resources in English and Spanish, with valid and reliable digital assessments that inform instruction. BEC is also a provider of exceptional professional development to educators.

BEC is recognized as a responsive publisher that offers equally rigorous and engaging digital, print, and hybrid learning materials grounded in the Science of Reading research. BEC monitors research outcomes carefully to create effective foundational resources that include strong decoding materials with systematic and explicit instruction and high-quality resources focused on language development and comprehension. BEC's content-rich and authentic texts offer instruction in close reading and analysis, multiple perspectives, and authentic literature while building world knowledge and reflecting the individuality of every student in each diverse classroom.

Family owned and operated for more than 25 years,