Platform Enterprise Architect

Ascend Learning is a national leader in data driven, online educational solutions for learners, educators and employers in high-growth, licensure-driven professions spanning healthcare, fitness and wellness, skilled trades, insurance and financial services. We are passionate about accelerating learning while impacting job readiness, employment success and employee retention with the belief that our work changes lives.

Our culture is intentionally results-driven and selfless with a relentless focus on our customers. We believe in trust, transparency, freedom and responsibility with a commitment to meritocracy, inclusion and diversity of thought. Continual investment in our over 1400 employees is also a core principle realized through ongoing professional development and providing opportunities to grow, develop and lead. Ascend Learning is headquartered in Burlington, MA with additional office locations and remote workers in cities across the U.S. and in the U.K.

Ascend Learning Technology & Operations is hiring now for a Platform Architect to provide strategy, roadmaps and overall architecture vision to the healthcare platform landscape.Leawood, KS office/hybrid or Burlington, MA office/hybrid preferred.

Ascend consists of many related but independent brands, each of which are providing online learning tools to a specific market or career domain. Each of these brands serves their customers and operates their brand via one of Ascend's platforms. A given platform could be hosting multiple brands or could be dedicated to a single brand.

Ascend divides its technology into 6 competency areas that are deployed across multiple platforms. As a platform architect you will be joining the Platform Architecture portion of the architecture organization. The other architects are responsible for one or more of the competency areas. The platform architects are responsible for how the competency areas come together across each of the Ascend platforms. This platform architect position is focused on our Healthcare platforms.

A platform is composed of many different components that in combination meet the needs of the brand hosted on that platform. We achieve economies of scale by utilizing individual instances of the same component across multiple platforms, while still allowing differences in component choice to best meet the needs of a given brand.

The responsibilities of the Platform Architect fall into the following four categories.

Understand

• Understand current architectural state of all the Ascend healthcare platforms including the standard components and the non-standard components
• Understand the strategies and roadmaps of our business partners as it relates to the Ascend healthcare platforms
• Understand the vision, strategy and roadmaps of the competency-based Architecture Teams
• architecturally significant NFR needs and shortcomings for each platform

Lead

• Lead in working with business partners to understand their needs and to bridge the gap to architecture by ensuring the right architecture teams are brought in appropriately
• Lead engineering teams to ensure they understand who they need to connect with in architecture or other engineering teams for a given platform
• Bring platform-based input to the competency based arch teams as they work to create architectures for their competency areas

Create

• Create documentation around current state architectures of each platform, working with architectures
• Create high level project architectures for projects that span multiple competency areas, providing a scaffold for competency arch teams to provide the detailed architectures
• Create tracking of the shared services and unique aspects of our platforms and their change over time.

Manage

• Manage with PMO to help connect the right arch teams to specific projects and needs and ensure flow
• Manage with PMO and product owners as the architectural organizer for capital planning efforts, ensuring the right architecture teams are involved in decision making

Education & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Information Systems, Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent work experience
• Minimum 10 years in a software engineering or equivalent position
• Minimum 3 years in a management position or leadership position
• Minimum 3 years defining, documenting, and driving implementation of software architectures
• Experience with microservice architectures
• Experience with synchronous communication especially via REST APIs
• Experience with asynchronous communication especially utilizing Avro and Kafka
• Experience working in the healthcare market preferred

Skills & Abilities

• Big picture / High-level architecture: Must be able to think at a high level about the overall systems and goals of the projects
• Strong communication skills
• Interacting with business people to understand and further elucidate business needs
• Translation of business needs and requirements into Architectural solutions
• Ability to present technical architectures and concepts to non-technical people
• Strong critical thinking and problem-solving skills
• Able to produce clear documentation to convey architecture, development standards, roadmaps, and potential challenges to all both technical and non-technical resources
• Passion and the ability to learn new things
• Disciplined, dynamic and flexible to manage multiple projects and tasks, work effectively in a rapidly changing environment and meet ongoing and overlapping deadlines
• Work weekends/nights on occasion for on-call incident troubleshooting or administration of regular, off-hour deployments

This position requires that the employee be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, unlessan exemptionhas been granted by Ascend Learning for a religious, health-related or other legally-mandated reason, which will be considered on a case-by-case basis in accordance with applicable law. Individuals are considered "fully vaccinated" (1) two weeks after their second dose in a 2-dose series (such as Pfizer or Moderna vaccines); or (2) two weeks after a single-does vaccine (such as Johnson & Johnson's Janssen vaccine).Ascend Learning's current policy also requires that individuals visiting our offices be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. In line with our commitment to the safety and wellbeing of our employees, if we choose to interview you and you are fully vaccinated, we may invite you to interview in our office. If you are not fully vaccinated and we choose to interview you, we will arrange for a virtual interview.

Ascend Learning, LLC is proud to be an equal opportunity employer(M/F/Vets/Disabled). No agency or search firm submissions will be accepted. Applications for U.S. based positions with Ascend Learning, LLC must be legally authorized to work in the United States and verification of employment eligibility will be required at the time of hire.

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