Solutions Architect

About the role

The Solutions Architect plays a critical role in advancing LSAC's mission by designing and delivering scalable, secure, and high-performing technology solutions that align with our business and mission objectives. This role requires a deep understanding of Azure services, modern web technologies, and infrastructure-as-code practices.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and hands-on implementation of Azure-based solutions, focusing on reusability, scalability, fault-tolerance, and security.
• Author production code in .NET Core, React, services, and APIs.
• Define and enforce patterns by building reference implementations.
• Establish infrastructure-as-code (IaC) as a foundational practice.
• Design and build CI/CD pipelines and developer tooling.
• Stand up the production support at scale, including observability, SLOs, alerting, runbooks, on-call rotations, incident response practices, and post-incident reviews.
• Partner with the SRE team and support engineering to operationalize patterns and uplift the current model where gaps exist.
• Lead the response to high-severity production issues, debug across the stack, and ship fixes or mitigations.
• Design and implement microservices and APIs with thoughtful contracts; build reusable components and libraries that other teams adopt.
• Provide technical leadership and code review across multiple agile teams, raising the bar for quality, testability, and operational readiness.
• Collaborate with Cloud Architecture on Azure landing zones, networking, and identity to ensure platform-level decisions translate cleanly into application-level ones.
• Partner with product management to translate roadmap objectives into pragmatic technical plans, including MVP framing, sequencing, and trade-offs.
• Evaluate third-party tools and platforms; produce written recommendations grounded in technical assessment, cost, and operational impact.
• Communicate architectural decisions, trade-offs, and risks clearly in writing and verbally to stakeholders ranging from engineers to senior leaders.
• Continuously look for and implement improvements in software delivery, platform reliability, and developer experience.
• Champion practical generative AI adoption: coach and mentor engineers on AI-assisted development, prompt design, AI-augmented code review, and AI-accelerated test generation.
• Establish team-wide prompting standards and review practices for AI-generated code, and lead by example by using these tools in your own day-to-day work.
• Architect generative AI capabilities as needed, including LLM integrations, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agentic patterns; embed Responsible AI practices from day one.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive experience designing and building large-scale, cloud-native platforms, with at least 3 years in a senior or lead architecture role.
• Production experience with Azure, .NET Core, and React (or comparable modern web stack).
• Experience leading the introduction or maturation of infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD practices in an organization.
• Experience standing up or significantly maturing site reliability engineering, platform engineering, or production-support practices in a mid-sized engineering organization.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Azure certifications such as Azure Solutions Architect Expert or DevOps Engineer Expert.
• Experience in EdTech, higher education, or other regulated or compliance-sensitive domains.
• Coursework, certifications, or verifiable project experience in applied AI/ML, natural language processing, or LLM application development.
• Supervisory responsibilities: this role does not have people management responsibilities.