Senior Principal Architect

<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>

United States, 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/

keywords: position summary,position details,compensation,leadership,strategy,analysis,project management,operations,performance,education,experience,knowledge,skills

Non-Manager

Competitive Compensation and Benefits Package

Overview: <p><strong>The Senior Principal Architect serves the company as an advisor on best practices and is responsible for designing and effectively implementing strategies and solutions in alignment with IT strategy and guidelines.&nbsp;It will provide overall direction, guidance, definition, and facilitation for the development of architecture required to meet product strategies and goals. The role will identify, support, and analyze business drivers, technology strategies, and current technology environment and recommend solutions to improve, develop, and align engineering to the business. The position will lead, consult, or oversee multiple highly complex projects/programs/domains that have significant impacts and require in-depth technical knowledge across multiple specific architecture disciplines such as technology, solution, business, or information/data.<br /><br /></strong><em>Actual compensation decision relies on the consideration of internal equity, candidate&rsquo;s skills and professional experience, geographic location, market and other potential factors. It is not standard practice for an offer to be at or near the top of the range, and therefore a reasonable estimate for this role is between $80,900 and $211,900</em><strong><br /></strong></p>
Responsibilities: <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>Leads governance processes of new technologies and solutions to ensure consistent technology life cycle management.</li> <li>Leads the development of holistic blueprints in coordination with the domain architects. Coordinates with other Plans and strategic partners, identifying opportunities for shared solutions.</li> <li>Leads and coordinates the domain technical and business discussions relative to future architecture direction.</li> <li>Guides strategy development and ensure alignment with architectural strategy and business goals.</li> <li>Analyzes, designs, and develops a roadmap and implementation plan based upon a current vs. future state in a cohesive architecture viewpoint.</li> <li>Defines, drives and performs data profiling and data modelling.&nbsp;</li> <li>Defines principles that guide technology decisions and the relationship between enterprise business context (industry and market trends) and specified technology.</li> <li>Leads 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>Serves as infrastructure design subject matter expert to business areas, project teams and vendors to apply and execute appropriate use of technology solutions and lead efforts to examine technology vision, opportunities, and challenges.</li> <li>Leads in the evaluation, selection and implementation of technology solutions including providing detailed analysis of pros and cons and build vs buy options.</li> <li>Participates in the business strategic planning cycle, gaining an understanding of common issues, drivers, imperatives, and objectives across the enterprise.</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>Facilitates project handoffs including preparing documentation, educating, and supporting to ensure smooth transitions.</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. &nbsp;Benchmarks technology strategies and architectures. &nbsp;Monitors and anticipates trends and investigates organizational objectives and needs. &nbsp;Prepares bench marking 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>Provides technical guidance to subordinate group.&nbsp;</li> <li>Establishes and maintains vendor relationships to review and evaluate designs and controls and influence changes in future product releases.</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 Agile 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>Additional Responsibilities/Tasks for Data</strong></p> <ul> <li>Assisting in the structuring of data including methods of storing and retrieving data</li> <li>Facilitates and creates reporting tools and automating the delivery of reports to dashboards</li> <li>Facilitate and/or creates data interfaces and facilitates integration of data</li> <li>Works closely with Tech Leads on Level 1 &ndash; Delivery Teams ensuring key architectural guidelines and code quality standards are followed during Feature implementation.</li> <li>Data Architects work with Solution Architects (L3) to maintain and continuously update the enterprise capability map ensuring technical ownership of current and future capabilities.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</li> </ul>
Requirements: <p><strong>EDUCATION&nbsp;</strong></p> <ul> <li>Bachelor&rsquo;s degree in computer science or related area required. Master&rsquo;s preferred.&nbsp;</li> <li>Continuous learning, as defined by the Company&rsquo;s learning philosophy, is required.</li> <li>Azure or AWS Solution Architect certification or progress toward certification is highly preferred and encouraged.&nbsp;</li> <li>Prior development and scrum/agile experience.&nbsp;</li> <li>Experience with RDBMS (Oracle 10g/11g, MS SQL 2005/2008), including database design, developing stored procedures and functions, and performance tuning.&nbsp;</li> <li>Working experiences with No-SQL databases such as MongoDB, Azure CosmosDB, AWS DynamoDB are preferred.</li> </ul> <p><strong>EXPERIENCE</strong></p> <ul> <li>Ten years of progressive responsibility in an IT environment with demonstrated technical knowledge which provides the necessary skills, knowledge, and abilities.&nbsp;</li> <li>Three years relevant experience with enterprise-wide integration architecture required.&nbsp;</li> <li>One year of leadership experience required.</li> </ul> <p><strong>QUALIFICATIONS/SKILLS/KNOWLEDGE/ABILITIES (SKA) REQUIRED:&nbsp;</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>Deep knowledge and understanding of data profiling and data modelling</li> <li>Ability to diagram and document designs and requirements</li> <li>Strong verbal and written communication skills with presentation experience.</li> <li>Ability to work as a collaborative member of a team while also being comfortable in leading a work initiative when directed to do so.</li> <li>Ability to set strategic architectural direction in integration technologies.</li> <li>Deep knowledge in service-oriented architecture frameworks, standards and tools.</li> <li>Deep understanding of the architecture standards and best practices surrounding integration technologies</li> <li>Deep understanding of the security considerations and implications&nbsp;</li> <li>Ability to determine the architectural implications from requirements that impact other areas of enterprise architecture.</li> <li>Ability to breakdown requirements into project estimates and to determine timelines and dependencies with the other domains/ projects.</li> <li>Ability to manage small work teams with experience in one or more project management tools</li> <li>.Clear understanding of ongoing and planned projects and their inter-dependencies/timelines.</li> <li>Clear understanding of the data governance process.</li> <li>Deep understanding of all Enterprise Architecture processes.</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>ADDITIONAL SKILLS/KNOWELDGE/ABILITIES (SKA) REQUIRED for Data:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Deep knowledge and understanding of structuring data and the methods of storing and retrieving data</li> <li>Expert knowledge of data masking and encryption, reporting tools, and automating the delivery of reports to dashboards and customers</li> <li>Facilitate and/or the ability to create data interfaces and API extraction of data</li> <li>Familiarity of data tools such as Data Bricks, PowerBI, ElasticSearch, and SAS</li> <li>Knowledge of data platforms such as Amazon RDS, , , MS SQL, , Oracle SQL, Azure SQL, Snowflake</li> <li>Experience and knowledge of CI/CD, DataOps, Terraform (IaC)</li> <li>DBA skills such as DBA backup and performance tuning</li> <li>Experience with languages such as SQL and Python</li> <li>Experience with Agile frameworks such as Kanban, Scrum, SAFe</li> </ul>