Architect

JOB SUMMARY

This job, within area of expertise (application, solution, information, technology, business), designs, develops, implements, supports, and optimizes architecture strategy to meet business capabilities and needs.  Ensures completeness of architecture by adequately addressing all the pertinent concerns of its stakeholders.  Ensures integrity of architecture by connecting various views of stakeholders, reconciling conflicting concerns, and showing the trade-offs made in so doing.  Considers practicality and fitness for purpose in determining architecture to develop.  Leverage business and technology knowledge to enable and/or alter business processes, practices, organizations and systems.  Maintains knowledge of emerging technologies and best in class industry business trends and practices. 

ESSENTIAL RESPONSIBILITIES

• Provide strategic consultation to business customers in defining or designing business processes, functions and organizational structures, as well as in researching, identifying and internally marketing enabling technologies based on customer capability requirements. Facilitate development of enterprise business solutions that combine knowledge of particular business processes and issues, general technological options, and process facilitation techniques. Participate in enterprise strategy development, including environmental analysis, opportunity identification, value cases and business innovation portfolio development.
• Specifies and designs large or complex systems, solutions, networks, infrastructure elements, or processes. Selects appropriate design standards, methods and tools and ensures that they are applied effectively. Reviews others’ system design to ensure selection of appropriate technology, efficient use of resources and integration of multiple systems and technology. Establishes policy for selection of architecture components. Evaluates and undertakes impact analysis on major design options. Ensures that the system architecture balances functional, service quality and systems management requirements. Uses appropriate tools, including models of components and interfaces, to contribute to the development of architectures. Produces detailed component requirements, specifications and translates these into detailed solutions/designs for implementation using selected products. Provides advice on technical aspects of system development, integration (including requests for changes, deviations from specifications, etc.) and processes.  Ensures that relevant technical and business strategies, policies, standards and practices are applied correctly.
• Selects and uses tools and methods to establish, clarify, and communicate the functional and non-functional requirements of system users, their characteristics, and tasks.  Identifies the technical, organizational, and physical environment in which complex products or systems will operate. Identifies, proposes, initiates, and leads significant improvement programs, taking responsibility for the quality and appropriateness of the work performed and the realization of measurable business benefits. Modifies existing process improvement approaches and/or develops new approaches to achieving improvement.
• Ensures the resolution of a variety of architecture and business problems/
• Communicates effectively will all levels of organization.
• Manages expectations of customers, partners  and management.
• Participates in customer walkthroughs and plans; design and technical walk-throughs; and problem resolution and decision making.
• Interacts with departments across the organization as necessary, including the development and interpretation of complex requirements for peers and other staff.
• Maintains an in-depth knowledge of specific technical aspects in area of expertise and provides advice regarding their application.  The area of specific expertise may be any aspect of information or communication technology, technique, method, process, product, or application area:
• Provides leadership in the areas of expertise and architecture to peers, developers, management and business users including technical expertise, coaching, and ad-hoc training by: Preparing presentations on complex issues on the area of expertise: Presenting to their peers to ensure consistency to Highmark's strategic direction.
• Other duties as assigned or requested.

EDUCATION

Required

• Bachelor’s Degree in Information Technology or closely related field 

Substitutions

• none

Preferred

• Master's degree

EXPERIENCE

Required

• 3 years of experience in an IT discipline

Preferred

• None

LICENSES OR CERTIFICATIONS

Required

• None

Preferred

• Industry certifications
• Health insurance industry business knowledge
• Professional Cloud Architect (Google)
• Generative AI Leader (Google)
• TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework)

SKILLS

An Architect is not required to have experience in all of these, but is required to have those needed to support applications they are responsible for supporting. Current skill set are reviewed every other year, new skills may be required to meet changing business needs.

Preferred Skills:

• COBOL/JCL
• GCP Cloud
• Agentic AI/MCP
• Event-Streaming (Kafka, MQ)
• Domain-Driven Design
• C4 Diagramming
• Spring Boot
• Angular
• Non-Relational Databases
• CI/CD Pipelines
• Kubernetes
• Docker

IMS, DB2, Oracle and Teradata Databases, Data Warehousing

COBAL, Visual Basic, C C++, SAS

Java/JavaScript Framework

PEGA, CSS3, Mobile, JSON, Cognos, Hadoop, SQL, J2EE, HTML5/XML

Project Management Tools:

Waterfall

Agile

Certification in application areas such as:

Java Developer

DB2, Cogno, PEGA, Enterprise

Architect(SCEA), Project Management

LANGUAGE (Other than English)

None

TRAVEL REQUIREMENT

0% - 25%

PHYSICAL, MENTAL DEMANDS and WORKING CONDITIONS

Position Type

Office-based

Teaches / trains others regularly

Occasionally

Travel regularly from the office to various work sites or from site-to-site

Occasionally

Works primarily out-of-the office selling products/services (sales employees)

Never

Physical work site required

Yes

Disclaimer: The job description has been designed to indicate the general nature and essential duties and responsibilities of work performed by employees within this job title. It may not contain a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities, and qualifications required of employees to do this job.
Compliance Requirement: This job adheres to the ethical and legal standards and behavioral expectations as set forth in the code of business conduct and company policies.
As a component of job responsibilities, employees may have access to covered information, cardholder data, or other confidential customer information that must be protected at all times.  In connection with this, all employees must comply with both the Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) as described in the Notice of Privacy Practices and Privacy Policies and Procedures as well as all data security guidelines established within the Company’s Handbook of Privacy Policies and Practices and Information Security Policy. 
Furthermore, it is every employee’s responsibility to comply with the company’s Code of Business Conduct. This includes but is not limited to adherence to applicable federal and state laws, rules, and regulations as well as company policies and training requirements.

Pay Range Minimum:

Pay Range Maximum:

Base pay is determined by a variety of factors including a candidate’s qualifications, experience, and expected contributions, as well as internal peer equity, market, and business considerations.  The displayed salary range does not reflect any geographic differential Highmark may apply for certain locations based upon comparative markets.

Highmark Health and its affiliates prohibit discrimination against qualified individuals based on their status as protected veterans or individuals with disabilities and prohibit discrimination against all individuals based on any category protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.

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