Status: Exempt
Location: Hybrid work model, two days a week in office at headquarters
Salary: $140,000 – $160,000
As the Solution Architect, you will be a senior technical leader and hands-on practitioner who shapes how our engineering team designs, builds, and shapes software. You will work closely with a collaborative team of internal engineers and offshore contractors to set the technical direction for cloud, AI, and security across our product and platform – without the overhead of large-organization governance structures.
As the Solution Architect, you should be equally comfortable with whiteboarding a solution with a developer and presenting a technical recommendation to leadership. The ideal candidate brings strong cloud-native and AWS experience, a practical understanding of how to responsibly integrate AI into software products, and a security-first approach that keeps our systems and data protected – all while staying grounded in the realities of a lean, fast-moving team.
Job Description
Solution Design & Architecture
- Owns the technical design of new and evolving product features from initial whiteboard to documented solution ensuring they are scalable, maintainable, and secure.
- Establishes and communicates practical coding standards, design patterns, and architectural guardrails that the team can apply consistently day-to-day.
- Leads design sessions and code/architecture reviews with internal and offshore engineers, providing clear and constructive guidance.
- Evaluates new tools, frameworks, and vendors and makes grounded recommendations that fit our team size and delivery cadence.
Cloud & AI Delivery
- Designs and guides the implementation of cloud-native solutions on AWS, including migrations, modernization efforts, and new platform capabilities.
- Identifies practical opportunities to integrate AI and ML features such as intelligent automation, NLP-powered workflows, or LLM-based tools into our products.
- Runs hands-on working sessions with engineers to introduce and apply AI development techniques relevant to our stack and use cases.
- Champions cloud operations best practices: cost awareness, observability, resilience, and right-sized infrastructure for our scale.
Security & Compliance
- Applies security-by-design thinking to every solution, conducting lightweight threat modeling, enforcing least-privilege access, and reviewing common vulnerabilities.
- Collaborates with GRC and Cloud Operations to ensure solutions meet our compliance obligations, including NIST 800 and SOC 2 requirements.
- Guides the team on secure coding practices, secrets management, API security, and data protection across cloud environments.
- Supports vulnerability management and incident response readiness by ensuring security considerations are built into the delivery process not bolted on.
Team Enablement & Mentorship
- Acts as a go-to technical resource for internal engineers and offshore contractors by unblocking problems, answering design questions, and lifting team capability.
- Mentors mid-level and senior engineers through design challenges, code reviews, and career conversations.
- Drives adoption of Agile and DevSecOps practices and helps the team improve its delivery rhythm without introducing unnecessary processes.
- Partners with engineering leads to close skill gaps through targeted knowledge-sharing sessions, documentation, and tooling improvements.
Job Requirements
Education
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related discipline required; Master’s degree a plus.
- Relevant certifications preferred:
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate or Professional.
- AWS Certified Security – Specialty is a strong plus.
- CISSP or CISA – is beneficial but not required.
Experience
- 5 – 8 years of progressive experience in software architecture, cloud engineering, or full-stack development.
- Hands-on experience designing and operating cloud-native solutions on AWS in a production environment.
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical design across cross-functional teams, including remote or offshore contributors.
- Practical experience applying AI or ML capabilities in software products at any scale.
- Solid working knowledge of security principles and at least one compliance framework such as NIST 800, SOC 2, or similar.
- Track record of mentoring engineers and raising team-wide technical quality.
Technical Experience
- Strong AWS experience across core services such asEC2, EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3, IAM, CloudWatch, or GuardDuty Other cloud platforms are a plus.
- Cloud-native design: microservices, serverless, event-driven architecture, API gateway, and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or CloudFormation); CI/CD toolchains and DevSecOps pipeline design.
- Working knowledge of AI/ML tools and platforms such as SageMaker, Bedrock, OpenAI APIs, or LangChain-style frameworks.
- Familiarity with data integration patterns such as ETL/ELT pipelines, REST/event-based data flows, and basic data modeling.
- Practical awareness of responsible AI practices: knowing when and how to apply AI meaningfully without over-engineering.
- Security fundamentals such as IAM, secrets management, encryption, container security, and OWASP-aware API design.
- Working knowledge of NIST 800, SOC 2, and secure SDLC practices; experience collaborating with GRC functions.
- Comfort with vulnerability scanning tools, secure code review, and incident response runbooks.
- Proficiency in one or more modern application stacks such as .NET/C#, Python, Node.js — with REST and/or GraphQL API experience.
- Solid understanding of SOA, domain-driven design, and API-first patterns, as well as database design across relational and NoSQL stores.
- Familiarity with Agile/Scrum delivery and collaborative development practices in mixed onshore/offshore team environments.
Pay: $140,000.00 - $160,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- 401(k)
- 401(k) matching
- Dental insurance
- Employee assistance program
- Health insurance
- Life insurance
- Paid time off
- Parental leave
- Professional development assistance
- Retirement plan
- Tuition reimbursement
- Vision insurance
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Mount Prospect, IL 60056
