Senior Solutions Architect
Chicago, IL

Job Description

Application Instructions

Please list all professional experience and explain any gaps in employment history.

Job Description

Arc Publishing (https://www.arcpublishing.com/) is an award-winning, state-of-the-art digital platform and suite of tools that's engineered to meet the demands of modern publishers and brands around the world. Built by The Washington Post, Arc technology handles complex publishing and audience needs across video, web, apps, subscriptions and ad monetization, providing a competitive advantage enhanced by a set of sophisticated machine learning and AI-powered tools. Arc has powered the digital transformation of clients both large and small across the globe. At its core, Arc is about speed and innovation: for readers, newsrooms, brands, advertisers and developers.

As an increasing number of large digital publishers move their critical business processes to Arc Publishing, we are in need of high-powered technical consulting talent to assist their development teams in architecting sensible solutions on the Arc platform themselves, or in designing a well-conceived project plan and architecture for a solution that will be delivered by our own professional services team. The Arc digital publishing suite includes its own developer platform, and clients look to our team for assistance in helping them make the right technical design decisions to achieve their business needs.

The ideal candidate will have demonstrated experience working in technical consulting or professional services, ideally in a similar Solutions Architect function in a B2B SaaS product. As a Solutions Architect at Arc you will have the technical background to know how to leverage the platform's core capabilities in achieving a customer's business needs - and when to extend it with custom solutions. You'll become an expert at Arc's APIs and front-end development platform and become adept at instinctively seeing the correct path to a scalable, performant product solution built atop these interfaces. You have the product skills to identify customer business problems and have the interpersonal skills to work with the customer on the right solution. Among the Arc team, you will be the expert at knowing our clients' implementations and can explain the complexities of their architecture. Finally, you should also have a demonstrated ability to think strategically about business, product, and technical challenges as you help our customers take advantage of the efficiencies, cost savings and quick innovation available only in a cloud-hosted CMS such as Arc.

The Solutions Architect is part of our Professional Services organization and will work closely with the developers within the Professional Services team and the Account Management, Platform Engineering and Product Management orgs while designing solutions atop the Arc platform.

Responsibilities

* Coordinate and participate in post-sales processes such as solution design, SOW drafting, software development towards proof of concepts, technical design during implementation, technical training and more.
* Understand customer business requirements and translate them into a well-designed architecture and project plan.
* Aid Arc Professional Services project teams and customer teams in designing and developing solutions that enable rapid adoption of the Arc platform, and digital transformation of their business processes.
* Maintain consultative relationships with clients by providing support, information, and guidance as well as research and recommend new solutions and services.
* Mentor junior Arc Professional Services engineers on solving complex engineering challenges and on the customer-facing skills needed in a growing professional services team.
* Work with the Product Development team to identify customers with specific use cases or product needs, based on your knowledge of their architecture and product usage.
* Improve the Arc platform with useful documentation, training and re-usable code.

Minimum Qualifications

* BA/BS in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent practical experience.
* 5+ years of experience in a post-sales client-facing technical consulting capacity.
* 8+ years of experience building highly-scalable customer facing applications.
* Proficiency in at least one front-end JS framework.
* Proficiency in at least one back-end programming language.
* Familiarity with continuous-integration tools and patterns.
* Experience with multiple database and event processing systems.

Preferred Qualifications

* Proficiency with React.js.
* Ability to learn new technologies quickly.
* Experience building high-traffic public websites.
* Experience with data migration and systems integration projects.
* Experience building web applications on AWS or another cloud platform.
* Experience analyzing website performance performance.