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Position Overview
The Lead Solution Architect is a senior individual contributor responsible for shaping end-to-end solutions for complex initiatives spanning business processes, data, applications, integrations, cloud services, security, and operations. Anchored in the Corporate Functions Order-to-Cash domain, this role partners with product and business leaders from early planning through implementation to define solution direction, evaluate trade-offs and risks, clarify dependencies and ownership, and ensure solutions align with business and technology needs. The successful candidate will bring strong business-domain and technical expertise across areas such as Order-to-Cash, customer and master data, commercial and operational processes, regulatory compliance, SAP S/4 and SAP MDG, automation, and enterprise integrations. The role works across Commercial, Finance, Supply Chain, Data and Analytics, and operational functions to translate business needs into scalable solutions with clear data ownership, integrations, controls, and measurable outcomes.
The Lead Solution Architect also strengthens the broader architecture practice by developing reusable patterns, improving architecture standards and tools, mentoring others, and connecting enterprise architecture strategy to practical delivery decisions.
Key Responsibilities
- Supports architectural governance and compliance, and contributes to defining principles, guidelines, and standards.
- Participates and contributes to solution architecture reviews and ensures architecture adherence, including the development and application of reusable architecture patterns, decision trees, guardrails, and standing decisions based on proven delivery outcomes, with clear applicability, exceptions, ownership, status, provenance, and review expectations.
- Design and lead enterprise-scale solution architectures that span multiple systems or platforms, ensuring alignment with business goals, technical strategy, and enterprise architecture, within value streams, Owning the complete-solution thread across business process change, applications, data, integration, identity, security, infrastructure, cloud and SaaS services, operational technology boundaries where applicable, service transition, vendor commitments, and retirement impacts.
- Architect solutions for major modernization initiatives that deliver enhanced agility, scalability, and operational efficiency.
- Serve as the primary lead architectural advisor for cross-functional solution delivery, collaborating with business stakeholders, Enterprise and System Architects to ensure cohesive, value-driven designs, and partnering with Product Management, Engineering, Data, Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Finance, Supply Chain, vendors, and service owners to resolve cross-domain decisions and maintain end-to-end coherence.
- Define and enforce solution architecture standards, integration patterns, and governance practices that promote consistency, interoperability, and future-readiness across business units, including defining and maintaining solution intent, including interfaces and contracts, authoritative data sources, constraints, measurable quality attributes, dependency order, enablers, and the design freedom delegated to engineering teams.
- Mentor and develop solution and system architects and implementation teams (DevSecOps, Product teams, hybrid cloud, etc.), fostering a culture of innovation, technical excellence, and business-technology alignment.
- Shape strategic roadmaps and business capability models, ensuring that solution designs support long-term enterprise objectives and competitive differentiation, framing key decisions before the design by establishing the business outcome, accountable owner, affected landscape, credible options, material assumptions, unresolved questions, and the evidence required for an investment or delivery decision.
- Proactively identify and mitigate solution-level risks, incorporating emerging technologies and architectural foresight to ensure resilience, compliance, and adaptability.
- Guide implementation teams through material cross-system decisions, evaluate departures from approved intent, make consequences visible, and route decisions to the accountable business, product, domain, security, data, or technology owner.
- Orchestrate options assessments, architecture decision records, solution briefs, solution intent, non-functional requirements, interface contracts, change records, and as-built verification for complex initiatives, while avoiding documentation that does not enable, change, or preserve a decision.
Education and Experience
Bachelor’s Degree in Information Technology, related field, or equivalent experience required. Eight (8) or more years of relevant IT experience, including five (5) or more years of relevant architecture experience required.
Preferred Experience
- Experience in energy, manufacturing, logistics, commercial, refining, pipeline, or other operationally complex and regulated environments.
- Experience establishing or maturing an architecture practice through reusable patterns, standards, guardrails, governance mechanisms, knowledge management, mentoring, and continuous improvement.
- Experience carrying architecture through delivery and operation, including solution intent, measurable non-functional requirements, interface and data contracts, architecture decision records, material change assessment, and as-built verification.
- Experience supporting portfolio and product decision-making, including option analysis, technology and vendor evaluation, architecture trade-offs, roadmap and dependency shaping, investment inputs, and risk communication to business and technology leaders.
- Demonstrated experience leading architecture for complex, enterprise-scale initiatives spanning multiple systems, business capabilities, data domains, integration patterns, cloud or SaaS platforms, and organizational boundaries.
Skills
- Agile Methodology – Agile management is an iterative approach to delivering a project throughout its life cycle, taking incremental steps towards project the completion of a project.
- Analytical Thinking – Strong problem-solving skills to identify architectural challenges, analyze requirements, evaluate options, and propose effective solutions.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. These processes include learning (the acquisition of information and rules for using the information), reasoning (using rules to reach approximate or definite conclusions), and self-correction. AI encompasses a broad range of techniques and approaches, including machine learning, neural networks, natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, and expert systems, among others. The ultimate goal of AI is to create machines that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, making decisions, and solving problems.
- Authentic Communicator – Express