Solution Architect – Personalization
Location: Charlotte, NC (Preferred) | Tempe, AZ | Hybrid (3 days onsite)
Duration: Direct Hire / Full-Time
Industry: Retail / Convenience Store / Digital Customer Experience
Position Summary
We are seeking an experienced Solution Architect – Personalization to join a leading multinational convenience retail organization. This role will lead the architecture, design, and evolution of enterprise personalization and customer engagement solutions that support millions of customer interactions across digital and in-store channels.
The ideal candidate has experience designing enterprise-scale customer experience platforms, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), personalization engines, journey orchestration solutions, and digital marketing technologies. You will partner with business leaders, product managers, and engineering teams to define architecture strategy, create technology roadmaps, and deliver scalable solutions that enhance customer engagement and business outcomes.
Overview The Solution Architect, Personalization proactively and holistically leads and supports architecture activities that guide the development and management of a portfolio of solutions under the Enterprise Architecture scope. Solutions include, but are not limited to, customer data platforms, personalization engines, recommendation engines, loyalty engines, discount engines, promotional tools, communication platforms, content management systems, digital asset management systems, mobile apps, master data platforms, in-store digital screens, ERP, HRMS, and POS.
The architect provides the necessary leadership, analysis, and design for development solutions to ensure that solutions meet business needs and align with architectural governance and standards.
What you do Here are just a few ways that you’ll help make journeys better as you demonstrate competencies across four key dimensions.
1. Interpret Business Needs
- Translates customer journeys and business requirements into technical requirements into business capability maps, value-stream maps, architectural blueprint and technology enablers to achieve business objectives and documents all solution architecture design and analysis work.
- Works closely with the business owners, customer experience technology, technical product owners, and product managers to ensure a robust architectural runway that can support future business requirements throughout the product lifecycle.
- Understands business drivers and business capabilities (future and current state) and determines corresponding enterprise solution designs and change requirements to drive the organization’s targeted business outcomes. 2. Technical Leadership
- Guide development and engineering teams throughout the implementation process, providing technical expertise and vision.
3. Assess Technology
- Monitors the current-state solution portfolio to identify deficiencies through aging of the technologies used by the application, or misalignment with business requirements.
- Supports product managers in end-of-life product decisions to maintain, refresh or retire services, or systems, including applications, technologies, processes, and information.
- Understands emerging technology trends and disruptions and their practical application to enable new and evolving business and operating models.
- Analyzes the technology industry, competitors, and market trends, and determines their potential implications for a given solution.
- Analyzes the business-IT environment to detect critical deficiencies, legacy, and technical debt, and recommends solutions for improvement.
- Facilitates the evaluation and selection of software product standards and services, as well as the design of standard and custom software configurations.
- Consults with application and infrastructure development projects and products to fit systems or infrastructure to architecture and identify when it is necessary to modify designs to accommodate the solution architecture.
4. Apply Technology
- Leads evaluation, design, maintenance, and evolution of the solution architecture across a group of specific business applications or technologies based on enterprise business strategy, business capabilities, value-streams, business requirements and enterprise standards.
- Manages and develops the architecture for a broader scope of projects or products, driving application architects and other technical resources that manage and design architecture for a single project or product or initiative.
- Develops/improves the strategic roadmap for the evolution of the enterprise solution portfolio from current to future state, as defined by the solutions architecture that is aligned with business objectives.
- Acts as a consultant on a broad range of technologies, platforms, and vendor offerings to drive targeted business outcomes.
- Create architectural designs to guide and contextualize solution development across products, services, projects, and systems, including applications, technologies, processes, and information.
- Works closely with business and technology leaders as well as project and product managers to ensure the execution of plans corresponds with what is being promised throughout the project or product lifecycle.
- Provides consulting support to application architects within agile teams to ensure the project or product is aligned with the overall enterprise architecture.
5. Provide Enterprise Guidance
- Provides deliverables like standard definitions, reference models and architecture designs to support architectural governance to assess the impact of new and ongoing technology investment on business and IT estate.
- Supports a community of practice (CoP), guiding and helping agile teams and product owners to align with the overall enterprise architecture, governance and assurance.
- Designs and directs the governance activities associated with ensuring solution architecture assurance and compliance.
- Defines the principles, guidelines, standards, and solution patterns to ensure solution decisions are aligned with the enterprise’s future-state architecture vision.
What you need We want you to join our team! Here’s what we’re looking for.
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, engineering, system analysis or a related study, or equivalent experience
- Minimum of five years of experience in at least two IT solution development disciplines, including solution, application, technical or infrastructure architecture, network management, application development, middleware, database management or cloud development
- Exposure to multiple, diverse technologies, platforms, and processing environments
- Good understanding of strategic and emerging technology trends, and the practical application of existing and emerging technologies to new and evolving business and operating models
- Good understanding of product management, agile principles and development methodologies and capability of supporting agile teams by providing advice and guidance on opportunities, impact, and risks, taking account of technical and architectural debt
- Experience implementing an enterprise customer data platform and journey orchestration tool (Ideally Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe Journey Optimizer)
- Experience developing architecture blueprints, strategies, and roadmaps.
- Experience delivering presentations to senior-level executives and technical audiences.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Ability to work with developers in an outsourced environment.
- Ability to negotiate and resolve conflicts.
- Experience working in a relevant industry is helpful but not required.
What’s in it for you Our job openings in stores and offices allow you to grow quickly within a global company, while benefiting from a dynamic work environment that puts people first. Wherever you are on your journey, we have a place for you. Here are some of the attractive benefits we offer:
- Competitive Salary plus annual bonus payment.
- Complete benefits packages (medical, dental, 401k, employee stock plan, etc.).
- People Perks which allows for great discounts on food and fuel.
- Work for a leading, innovative, and growing company in convenience stores operations.
- Fortune 500 company and a 2-time Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award Winner.
- Tuition reimbursement of $5,000 per year.
- Learning opportunities to develop new skills and to evolve professionally in a fast-growing company.
- Major offices in Charlotte, NC, Laval, Quebec, Canada and Tempe, AZ.
