Solutions Architect - IT Global Sustainability

at  Costco Wholesale

Costco IT is responsible for the technical future of Costco Wholesale, the third largest retailer in the world with wholesale operations in fourteen countries. Despite our size and explosive international expansion, we continue to provide a family, employee centric atmosphere in which our employees thrive and succeed. As proof, Costco ranks eighth in Forbes “World’s Best Employers”.
This is an environment unlike anything in the high-tech world and the secret of Costco’s success is its culture. The value Costco puts on its employees is well documented in articles from a variety of publishers including Bloomberg and Forbes. Our employees and our members come FIRST. Costco is well known for its generosity and community service and has won many awards for its philanthropy. The company joins with its employees to take an active role in volunteering by sponsoring many opportunities to help others.
Come join the Costco Wholesale IT family. Costco IT is a dynamic, fast-paced environment, working through exciting transformation efforts. We are building the next generation retail environment where you will be surrounded by dedicated and highly professional employees.
Solution Architects create IT architecture and design solutions based on business requirements, industry trends, and technology options. Solution Architects are responsible and accountable for the solution architecture in partnership with enterprise architects, domain architects, and engineering teams. Solution Architects partner with the delivery team for solution planning, delivery, detailed design, and implemented solutions. Solution Architects ensure the implemented solutions are consistent with the approved architecture. Solution Architects communicate, mentor, and lead teams based on program or project needs for solution delivery.
If you want to be a part of one of the worldwide BEST companies “to work for”, simply apply and let your career be reimagined.

• Designs, develops, and ensures compliance to architectural standards throughout the lifecycle.
• Analyzes the Business-IT environment (run, grow, and transform the business) to detect critical deficiencies, and recommend solutions for improvement (systems of record, differentiation, and innovation).
• Identifies aging technology issues, or misalignment, with business requirements, and proposes solutions.
• Partners with Enterprise Architects for domain roadmaps and reference architecture.
• Executes projects and initiatives on the domain roadmap in partnership with Enterprise Architects.
• Consults with application and infrastructure development projects, and identifies when it is necessary to modify projects to accommodate the solution architecture.
• Ensures cohesiveness of solution designs across various projects/solutions.
• Collaborates with Enterprise Architects to balance needs between Solution Architectural Guardrails.
• Designs, develops, and directs solution architectures, design exceptions, and governance activities in compliance with target states, reference architectures, architecture standards, technology guardrails, and security and operational guidelines.
• Identifies the organizational impact (Skills, processes, structures, or culture) and financial impact of the solutions architecture.
• Creates non-functional specs for operational agility, disaster recovery, and support.
• Establishes solution delivery flow for continuous integration, testing and delivery, and operational deployment in partnership with project managers, solution leads, and other stakeholders.
• Conducts design reviews to validate alignment with architecture.
• Modifies solution architecture to support changing business or technology requirements.
• Documents solutions architecture design and analysis work, and communicates architectural decisions that impact solutions.
• Defines the principles, guidelines, standards, and solution patterns to ensure decisions are aligned with the enterprise’s future-state architecture vision.
• Communicates infrastructure, software, information, and/solution concepts to all levels of management.
• Designs methodology that consistently yields the right level of technical design documentation and develops technical solutions that conform both to customer requirements and information development standards.
• Adheres to Costco’s Architectural Framework and Governance model.
• Works with the Product Manager to define use cases, including alternate flows as needed.
• Establishes a Center-of-Excellence (CoE) within the portfolio to elicit, harvest, validate, and collaborate with System Architects and Full Stack Engineers (FSEs) to reach a consensus on key architecture decisions across systems in the portfolio.
• Moderates a Solution Architecture Review Board (SARB) at the portfolio level to approve the CoE’s key architecture decisions which meet the best compromise between portfolio Architecture, Product Management, Delivery Management, and leadership priorities.
• Works closely with PMO to scope and assist in implementation.
• Defines system/technical use cases and requirements.
• Evaluates non-functional requirements for testability and technical acceptance criteria.
• Addresses compliance requirements such as Payment Card Industry (PCI), Health Insurance Portability, and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX).
• Creates high-level models that guide solution architecture, including component, context, data-flow security, data, services, infrastructure, deployment, and integration viewpoints.
• Refines those high-level models based on ever-changing requirements.
• Creates transitional architecture views as part of solution design.
• Adheres to IT standards.
• Defines and documents the actions needed to close architecture gaps in support of business objectives.
• Participates in reviews of the designs, prototypes, and other technical deliverables to ensure they fulfill requirements and meet standards.
• Estimates development effort.