Solution Architect

CompanyFederal Reserve Bank of Kansas City

When you join the Federal Reserve—the nation's central bank—you’ll play a key role, collaborating with leading tech professionals to strengthen and protect our economic, financial and payments systems. We invest in contemporary and emerging technology each year to support the Federal Reserve and our economy, and we’re building a dynamic and diverse team for our future.

We are seeking a solution architect for our Public Affairs and Local Solutions Delivery teams to set vision, strategy, design, values, and priorities that enable us to achieve our mission. Our architects play a crucial leadership role and must demonstrate a strategic, action-oriented mindset focused on intellectual curiosity, agility, accountability, security, collaboration, and the ability to drive innovation through experimentation. They also serve as a mentor to our engineers providing guidance through new and complex experiences in a collaborative environment.

Public Affairs focuses on sharing the Bank's mission with the public and engaging with employees. The Public Affairs portfolio supports the Bank's efforts to share information with the public on its external website as well as the Bank's intranet, along with custom and SaaS products for high-level external engagement. The development team supporting them works in a fast paced, agile environment with exciting opportunities to innovate and drive high priority delivery initiatives through to completion.

As a solution architect, you will have accountability for technology choices, security and design solutions across the portfolio. You will be a technical leader responsible for researching, analyzing, proposing, and architecting requirements-based products and solutions that align with the business and technology needs by acting as a trusted partner to the business. You will collaborate with partners, technology providers, security, and other architects to develop technology and information architectures, solution designs, strategies, and roadmaps.

Key Activities

• Partner with senior leadership, Public Affairs, infrastructure providers and peers to help identify business needs and shape IT vision by offering appropriate strategic and tactical technical solutions to the business along with a transition roadmap & plan for realizing it.

• Define strategic direction in terms of the technologies, standards, processes, and current/target state architectures.

• Ensure product level solutions adhere to strategic direction in terms of the technologies, standards, processes, and current/target state architectures across the enterprise.

• Work across technology, organization, and business to outline large transformation programs and work with program leads and business lines to deliver on them.

• Partner with other Enterprise, Platform, Security, Data, and Infrastructure Architects to deliver best in class solutions.

• Evaluate new technologies and vendors that might be beneficial to the business line along with conducting vendor evaluation, proof of concepts, MVP definition, and recommend solutions for improvement to drive the business forward.

• Demonstrate leadership and agility when responding to change or when working with ambiguity.

• Guide the organization to incorporate architecture design patterns, system best practices and standards in architecture, security, and infrastructure.

• Pair program with, and mentor Software Engineers to implement patterns and best practices and assist in their personal growth and development.

• Perform peer reviews using software engineering principles, patterns, and development guidelines.

• Reviews detailed designs and collaborates with the delivery team for best solutions. Drives decisions by following applicable frameworks, patterns, and standards and ensuring that a shared technical and architectural vision is realized.

  • Serve as a point of coordination for the ops team during incidents.

  • Maintain the Portfolio’s Architecture Decision Log, 1 year and 3 year Technology Roadmaps, and ensure that strategic direction results in maintainability and simplification of the supporting technologies. 

  • Work with multiple Agile Product Owners to negotiate priorities and deliverables. 

Required Qualifications

• Typically requires at least 6 years of relevant experience.

• Bachelor’s degree specializing in a related STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) from an accredited college or university, or equivalent combination of directly related education and/or experience.

• Strong problem solving, oral and written communication skills, including experience with executive presentations.

• In-depth knowledge of current technology, industry standards and frameworks, information management & emerging technology trends and industry developments.

• Advanced level knowledge and recent experience coding in multiple programming languages (java, python, etc)

• Ability to relate architectural decisions and recommendations to business needs.

• Strong organizational skills to lead competing and dynamic priorities, and multiple concurrent activities.

• Experience defining future state strategy and architecture principles in support of business roadmaps.

• Strong understanding of software development methodologies including Agile and product centric execution models.

• Experience developing reference architecture, principles, and standards.

• Ability to drive ideas and influence stakeholders.

• Fosters an agile mindset enabling high-performing teams.

• Ability to confidently present for a variety of audiences.

• Experience with the following is required:

  • AWS Well Architected Framework, services and security best practices

  • Cloud networking across numerous accounts, environments, and vendors, and zero trust principles

  • Containerization

  • CI/CD pipelines using DevOps tooling

  • Integrations / API infrastructure and development, and associated tools and best practices

  • Experience with centralized application observability and monitoring across disparate tools and services (e.g. Grafana)

Preferred Qualifications

• Salesforce

• Content Management Solutions

• Use of GenAI

Additional Information

Location(s):

• Hybrid – Kansas City, MO (minimum of 50% monthly)

• Remote Eligible – No

Salary:

• $105,000 - $144,300 / Level I

• $121,300 - $166,800 / Level II

• Final offers are determined by factors including the candidate’s qualifications, internal alignment considerations, district assignment, and geographic location.

Screening: Certain eligibility requirements apply.

Sponsorship: The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City will not sponsor a new applicant for employment authorization for this position. Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States without the need for visa sponsorship now or in the future.

About Us

• Total Rewards & Benefits

• Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

• Who We Are

• What We Do

Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube

Full Time / Part TimeFull time

Regular / TemporaryRegular

Job Exempt (Yes / No)Yes

Job CategoryInformation Technology

Work ShiftFirst (United States of America)

The Federal Reserve Banks believe that diversity and inclusion among our employees is critical to our success as an organization, and we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool. The Federal Reserve Banks are committed to equal employment opportunity for employees and job applicants in compliance with applicable law and to an environment where employees are valued for their differences.

Always verify and apply to jobs on Federal Reserve System Careers (https://rb.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/FRS) or through verified Federal Reserve Bank social media channels.

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