Solutions Architect, Seattle, United States

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
500 Fifth Avenue North
Seattle, WA 98102
Tel: +1 (206) 709-3100

Division

Information Technology

Department

N/A

Location

Seattle

Foundation Overview

Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives.
In developing countries, it focuses on improving people's health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. In the United States, it seeks to ensure that all people-especially those with the fewest resources-have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life. Based in Seattle, the foundation is led by CEO Jeff Raikes and co-chair William H. Gates Sr., under the direction of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.

Group Summary

Do you believe technology can improve lives around the world? We do! We are IT at the Gates Foundation. We are a creative, dynamic group of technologists determined to help change the world. Bring your creative thinking to our tight knit, energetic team to help us achieve our mission. Work CAN be fun and inspiring – check us out.

Responsibilities
Seeking a solutions architect to support IT Business Intelligence team, emphasis on application architecture, information delivery, and data visualization. This individual will support a delivery team within a larger BI team structure. Individual will work closely with management team, technology leads, developers, designers, and information architects to ensure that a sustainable and scalable BI suite is delivered in a way that best meets current and future customer demand.

Product and Service Strategy: Develop and maintain the technology roadmap for key areas of Business Intelligence team. Collaborate with business and IT partners to ensure that the roadmap creates business value with technically sound solutions. Ensure implementations support technology and business roadmaps. Seek out opportunities to apply technical innovations to customer needs.

Solution Design: Develop and maintain a comprehensive technical blueprint of the team's services. Create solution options that align IT services with business sponsor's missions, goals and objectives with consideration of both technical and non-technical implications and trade-offs. Review and recommend selection of third-party software platforms. Follow Enterprise architecture best practices, adhering to and advocating for standard activities and deliverables for project solutions.

Solution Implementation: Produce blueprints that guide the development and implementation of BI solutions across multiple projects. Provide direction to technical teams during project delivery.

Customer Engagement: Deeply understand the customer's business capabilities and business strategies. Incorporate customer feedback into the team's solution architecture to support business strategies.

Continuous Improvement: Frequently monitor the business capability landscape to identify opportunities for greater long-term business value. Provide guidance on industry landscape to track the development of available solutions, and identify opportunities for adapting the team's solution architecture.

Qualifications

    Deep expertise with the Microsoft BI Stack, and industry leading BI technologies.

    - Expert level understanding of web architecture, application development, SDLC methodologies.

    - Experience in outlining solution architecture descriptions, monitoring and governing their implementation and identifying continual improvement opportunities in alignment with Enterprise Architecture framework.

    - Experience mapping business capabilities to long-term technology solutions.

    - Strong written and verbal communication skills, including public speaking and presentations; ability to articulate technology impact to business customers at all levels.

    - Complex problem-solving knowledge and skills, including conflict resolution and facilitation.

    - Ability to estimate and recommend total cost of ownership with and for colleagues & customers/business owners.

    - Experience contributing to and/or facilitating RFP processes with third-party vendors.

    - Expert-Level knowledge of MS SharePoint platform desired.

    - Bachelor's degree, with a degree in computer science desired.

    - Expert level knowledge of ETL architecture desired.

    - Professional level knowledge of BI Data Modeling concepts desired.

    - A minimum seven years of IT software development experience with: three years of application architecture design leveraging the MS BI stack and five years of software development within MS Platform (Windows, .NET, SQL, etc.).

    As part of our standard hiring process for new employees, employment with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will be contingent upon successful completion of a background check