Cloud Architect II (hybrid remote and onsite Lansing, MI)

<strong>AF Group (Lansing, Mich.) and its subsidiaries are a premier provider of innovative insurance solutions. Insurance policies may be issued by any of the following companies within AF Group: Accident Fund Insurance Company of America, Accident Fund National Insurance Company, Accident Fund General Insurance Company, United Wisconsin Insurance Company, Third Coast Insurance Company, or CompWest Insurance Company.</strong>

Lansing, USA

AF Group

<p class="p1"><strong>AF Group&rsquo;s focused and passionate team uses industry-leading best practices, analytics and resources to manage risk and minimize loss for our policyholders while strengthening businesses with our valued independent agent partners.</strong></p> <p class="p1"><strong>We strive to continuously increase the long-term value of our organization by outperforming our industry peers and fostering a culture of underwriting and claims excellence.</strong></p> https://www.afgroup.com/

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Non-Manager

Competitive Compensation and Benefits Package

Overview: <br />The Architect II assists in the creation of best practices and is responsible for designing and effectively implementing strategies and solutions in alignment with IT strategy and guidelines. This position assists in the development of actionable blueprints, principles, models, designs, standards, and guidelines for assigned projects/initiatives to ensure information technology architecture is consistent, usable, secure, and adds value to the business. The position helps facilitate design and implementation of flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solutions and provides technical guidance to subordinate group.<br /><br /> <p><strong>WORKING CONDITIONS:</strong></p> <p>Work is performed both in the office and in the field with minimal hazards.</p>
Responsibilities: <br /> <ul> <li>Accountable for adhering to corporate architecture standards, ensuring technology standards and best practices are maintained across the organization, and contributing to corporate architecture strategy-setting.</li> <li>Participates in formulating solution estimates and work planning including determining appropriate task sequencing and identification of technical skill sets required.</li> <li>Builds consensus around principles of infrastructure architecture and interprets and clarifies these principles.</li> <li>Participates in the evaluation, selection, and implementation of technology solutions including providing detailed analysis of pros and cons and build vs buy options.</li> <li>Maintains operational, architectural, and design documentation including procedures, task lists, and blueprints.</li> <li>Evaluates strengths and flaws in infrastructure design including performance, quality, availability, simplicity of design, security, and total cost of ownership.</li> <li>Assists in the facilitation of project handoffs including preparing documentation, educating, and supporting to ensure smooth transitions.</li> <li>Establishes and maintains relationships with IT and business area partners and provides consultation to the business teams.</li> <li>Troubleshoots, recommends, and executes action plans for issue resolution.</li> <li>Selects and designs tools that allow reuse of design components and patterns between projects.</li> <li>Continually works to enhance breadth and depth of knowledge and experience. Benchmarks technology strategies and architectures. Monitors and anticipates trends and investigates organizational objectives and needs. Prepares benchmarking reports and presentations.</li> <li>Promotes implementation of new technology, solutions, and methods to improve business processes, efficiency, effectiveness, and value delivered to customers.</li> <li>Develops actual working solutions or prototypes based on their own designs and resolves any issues that arise.</li> <li>Stays updated on current technology trends and industry best practices.</li> <li>Provides technical leadership and works effectively with different teams including Product Managers, Project Managers, and Engineers.</li> <li>Fosters a healthy, collaborative and productive scrum team culture</li> <li>Works with other leads in a project setting to define and execute a software architecture that is sustainable, flexible, and scalable</li> <li>Leads key initiative design, highly capable to complete tasks both independently with minimal guidance and leading a team technically</li> <li>Exchanges information clearly and precisely, in verbal or written form, by sharing ideas, reporting facts and other information, responding to questions, and employing active listening techniques.</li> </ul> <p><strong><br />Additional Responsibilities/Tasks for Infrastructure:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Works with networks and understands internet security protocols.&nbsp;Analyze existing systems to ensure adequate security and business continuality.</li> <li>Works with web servers, application server administration, and web applications deployment.</li> <li>Routing and switching technologies including TCP, UDP, IP, BGP, OSPF, Spanning Tree, 802.x, WLAN, ISO models</li> <li>Create designs to support appropriate technology choices</li> <li>Create strategy for server &amp; network technologies</li> </ul>
Requirements: <br /> <p><strong>EDUCATION OR EQUIVALENT EXPERIENCE:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Bachelor&rsquo;s Degree in Computer Science or related area required. &nbsp;</li> <li>Master&rsquo;s preferred.</li> <li>Continuous learning, as defined by the Company&rsquo;s learning philosophy, is required.&nbsp;</li> <li>Azure or AWS Solution Architect certification or progress toward certification is highly preferred and encouraged.<strong>&nbsp;</strong></li> <li>Prior development and scrum/agile experience.</li> <li>Past experience with RDBMS (Oracle 10g/11g, MS SQL 2005/2008), including database design, developing stored procedures and functions, and performance tuning.</li> <li>Working experiences with No-SQL databases such as MongoDB, Azure CosmosDB, AWS DynamoDB are preferred.</li> </ul> <br /> <p><strong>EXPERIENCE:</strong></p> <ul> <li>5 years experience in the implementation and maintenance of enterprise-level systems.</li> <li>Experience in a large complex enterprise environment, preferably in Healthcare, Insurance, or similarly government-regulated environment.</li> </ul> <br /> <p><strong>SKILLS/KNOWLEDGE/ABILITIES (SKA) REQUIRED:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Strong communication and written skills. Ability to work out differences of opinions and publish scalable and quality system design based on specification.</li> <li>Strong knowledge of OOAD and multi-tier architectures, including MVC/MVP/MVVM design patterns.</li> <li>Strong knowledge of enterprise software development techniques such as SOA/EDA-based design, Microservices using Web API, Queue based processing using any messaging technologies such as RabbitMQ, MSMQ, etc.</li> <li>Ability to develop and maintain large scale, high performing, high transactional systems</li> <li>Ability to diagram and document designs and requirements</li> <li>Knowledge of Security protocols and the design, integration, and maintenance of these protocols.</li> <li>Ability to manage, assess and negotiate with vendors.</li> <li>Ability to mentor and lend guidance to team as needed.</li> <li>Expert knowledge of architectural design.</li> <li>Demonstrated ability to work in teams and capture ideas into strategy and standards</li> <li>Ability to execute governance of cloud standards and strategy</li> <li>Ability to set strategic architectural direction.</li> <li>Ability to identify architecture components for reuse.</li> <li>A clear understanding of the architecture standards.</li> <li>Ability to communicate effectively with Leadership, Business Partners, and IT Infrastructure team</li> <li>Knowledge of IT and IT&rsquo;s priorities, strategies, and current capabilities.</li> <li>Knowledge of technology and the current technical environment.</li> <li>Ability to break down the requirements into projects and determine timelines and dependencies with the other domains/projects.</li> <li>Understanding of ongoing and planned projects and their inter-dependencies/ timelines.</li> <li>Strong analytical, problem solving, and planning skills.</li> <li>Excellent interpersonal and communication skills.</li> <li>Ability to multi-task in a fast-paced environment.</li> <li>Flexibility to adapt readily to changing business needs.</li> <li>Enthusiastic, can-do attitude with the drive to learn and improve</li> </ul> <p><strong><br />ADDITIONAL SKILLS/KNOWLEDGE/ABILITIES (SKA) REQUIRED for Infrastructure:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Ability to understand networks and internet security protocols.&nbsp;Analyze existing systems to ensure adequate security and business continuality.</li> <li>Knowledge of web server and application server administration and web applications deployment.</li> <li>Knowledge of server sizing and performance</li> <li>Knowledge of network design and performance</li> <li>Familiarity with routing and switching technologies such as TCP, UDP, IP, BGP, OSPF, Spanning Tree, 802.x, WLAN, and ISO models</li> <li>Knowledge of Firewalls and ACLs</li> <li>Knowledge of VMWare ESX and Microsoft Hypervisor</li> <li>Familiarity of Cloud Infrastructure including infrastructure as code (prefer Azure and AWS)</li> <li>Knowledge of patching and assessment technologies</li> </ul>