Ahold Delhaize USA, a division of global food retailer Ahold Delhaize, is part of the U.S. family of brands, which includes five leading omnichannel grocery brands - Food Lion, Giant Food, The GIANT Company, Hannaford and Stop & Shop. Our associates support the brands with a wide range of services, including Finance, Legal, Sustainability, Commercial, Digital and E-commerce, Technology and more.

Primary Purpose

The Solutions Architect I is responsible for translating business requirements into solution architecture deliverables. They collaborate closely with the Architecture Community and Application/Product teams to ensure that business needs are understood, assessed, and translated into feasible, effective technological solutions. This is a strategic role, focusing on complex solution design across multiple projects or products. The Solution Architect I will be involved in setting technical direction, mentoring other solution architects, and engaging product leaders and business stakeholders. They are expected to have a broader vision, aligning with the greater architecture community. Solution Architects engage closely with stakeholders to grasp the business requirements, analyze the technical feasibility of proposed solutions, and create detailed architectural designs that address functional and non-functional requirements. When designing the solution, they consider scalability, security, performance, and integration factors, ensuring its alignment with enterprise architecture guidelines and strategic goals.

Solution Architects play a crucial role in:

• Providing technical leadership and guidance during the project execution, making sure the proposed architecture is implemented accurately.
• Lead vendor selection and management, contributing to procuring the appropriate technologies and services.
• Ensuring knowledge transfer and maintaining comprehensive documentation, facilitating consistency and continuity even when team members change.
• Evaluate the project's outcome, measuring its results against the expected benefits outlined in the architecture design.
• Present architecture designs to Enterprise Architects and, when necessary, the architecture forum, ensuring that all solutions adhere to the defined guidelines and standards.
• Stay updated with industry trends and emerging technologies, leveraging this knowledge to drive innovation and continuous improvement within the broader team.

Duties & Responsibilities

• Acts as a trusted advisor to business stakeholders, product teams, and development teams, providing recommendations and influencing decision-making processes for IT solutions and value stream optimization.
• Collaborates with Enterprise Architects to align solution architecture with enterprise architecture standards and vision.

• Responsible for developing and reviewing the solution architecture (blueprint) for products and value stream, including interaction requirements for specific components, subsystems, and interfaces within the application or solution.
• Designs future-proof and scalable solutions, considering all hardware, infrastructure, and data constraints.
• Drives simplicity in IT solution design by re-using assets; degree of asset re-use across the enterprise.
• Aligns with cross functional areas to ensure the user story or product backlog item meets a set of team-established criteria as to whether the story is ready for a sprint.
• Contributes to the creation of IT/Architecture standards and guidelines to define the overall solution architecture.
• Mentors and provides direction to Solution Architects and other technical team members.
• Responsible for identifying non-functional requirements to ensure the architectural design meets the required performance, security, scalability, availability, and other quality attributes.
• Responsible for identifying non-functional requirements to ensure the architectural design meets the required performance, security, scalability, availability, and other quality attributes.
• Leads the assessment and adoption of new technologies and methodologies that can provide a competitive advantage.
• Ensures license efficiency and compliance with vendor guidelines.
• Reviews IT solution design for every new or changed solution and ensures alignment with enterprise architecture standards, policies, and procedures. Ensure all security and compliance aspects are considered in the architecture (e.g., secure by design, compliant by design)

• Supports the program & project delivery teams to embed security, privacy, and regulatory needs into the solution.

Required Qualifications

• Master's degree in computer science or Technical field and Master's Degree in Technology and/or Business related field; equivalent trainings/certifications/experience equivalency will be considered
• 8 or more years of equivalent experience in relevant job or field of technology.
• 5 or more years of equivalent experience in an advanced role or technical capacity, leading teams directly or indirectly
• 5 or more years' experience directly responsible for guiding, training or onboarding team members in relevant technologies, capabilities or skills.
• 5+ years of Practical Experience in IT Architecture (i.e., solution architecture) plus various software designs and development languages
• Working Knowledge of business ecosystems, SaaS, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), SOA, APIs, microservices, and integration topics like event-driven architecture
• 5+ years of design, implementation, and/or support of complex application architectures (i.e. having an architectural sense for connecting disparate data sources, structured and unstructured data, etc.) required
• Experience leveraging TDD/CI/CD and robust build/test automation, with a preference for cross platform stacks and containerization (Git, Maven, Jenkins, Crucible, Sonar, Docker, AKS etc.)
• Experienced in agile software development lifecycle, and how to drive the technology roadmap concurrent with the feature roadmap.
• Knowledge of budget planning and financial management, esp. a product or application cost to acquire and run.
• Excellent leadership skills with the ability to lead others, influence outcomes, facilitate meetings, negotiate and achieve results.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication, collaboration and presentation skills.
• Exceptional analytical, problem solving and critical thinking skills.
• Data Security First mindset

Preferred Qualifications

• Post graduate degree advanced training and or certifications in relevant field/s of study preferred.
• 5 or more years experience in Agile teams and Product/Platform based operating model.
• Relevant professional certifications (e.g., TOGAF, ArchiMate, Cloud Solution Architect)
• Experience in retail or grocery preferred.
• Experience with GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps Pipeline,
• Experience interacting with Infrastructure, network, and security aspects

#LI-CW1 #LI-Hybrid #DiceJobs

At Ahold Delhaize USA, we provide services to one of the largest portfolios of grocery companies in the nation, and we're actively seeking top talent. Our team shares a common motivation to drive change, take ownership and enable our brands to better care for their customers. We thrive on supporting great local grocery brands and their strategies.

We offer an experience where our associates are valued; Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging are infused in our business and our employees are representative of the communities that we serve. We believe in total wellness, which encompasses a blend of physical, financial and emotional wellness.

We believe in collaboration, curiosity, and continuous learning in all that we think, create and do. While building a culture where personal and professional growth are just as important as business growth, we invest in our people, empowering them to learn, grow and deliver at all levels of the business.