Salesforce Architect

Platform Architect – Salesforce is a unique opportunity to create a vision and strategy for platform architecture, and to define best practices for Baird’s platform and integration strategy. This role will include a heavy leadership component to include mentoring and coaching team members, a broad impact on multiple teams, and influence at the enterprise level.

The Salesforce Architect position is a hybrid opportunity working 2-3 days/week onsite. Chicago or Madison Associates will be required to travel to the Milwaukee office once a week.

As a Salesforce Architect, you will:

Strategize:

• Influence and drive the direction of platform development architecture, versions, and toolsets.
• Assist in advising the IT vision, strategy, technology innovations, licensing, and architecture services.
• Assist in the development of policies, standards, and guidelines.
• Develop policies, standards, best practices, and guidelines, and communicate to teams with a focus on empowering others to implement quality value-add solutions.
• Help deliver highly technical concepts by researching and building POCs to assess viability within the Salesforce environment.
• Design, prototype, document and implement the strategic roadmap ensuring its feasibility.
• Conceptualize and design technology-based solutions within scope of the business unit application domain.
• Drive Salesforce Well-Architected tenants within the organization and aligned teams.
• Help platform teams develop solutions that enable businesses to capitalize on business insights and drive toward gaining a competitive advantage.
• Strive to understand the platform needs of the business community, as well as the problems faced by business users.
• Demonstrate ability to perform strategic thinking by viewing initiatives both within the immediate project context as well as the overall vision.

Design:

• Work with teams on high-level project direction and creation of technical requirements.
• Translate business requirements and product vision into platform architecture.
• Communicate requirements, architecture, and test plans to platform team members.
• Ensure project deliverables meet overall architecture direction, including providing and owning trade-off choices, and definition of applicable test plans.
• Review system design to assure that applications will exhibit expected levels of performance, scalability, security, and appropriate reusability upon release.
• Articulate pros and cons of architectural design options and provide clear recommendations on preferred-path solution design.
• Perform system and risk analysis of project features and solutions.
• Provide production problem diagnosis and technical support.

Collaborate!

• Use the mentoring and pairing model to build knowledge and skills to help create solid platform solutions and coach platform development principles.
• Proactively work with other members of the platform team to complete high-value deliverables as identified by business partners and team leadership.
• Partner with architecture and technical teams to provide direction during POC of solutions.
• Partner with technical leaders of Baird's third-party solutions vendors to determine integration strategy into Baird's Technology Infrastructure.
• Act as the platform technical subject matter expert.
• Consult with project technical leaders on trade-off decisions as required.

Provide technical leadership, mentoring and awareness to IT and business team members.

• Lead architectural design and strategy discussions.
• Demonstrate competence, experience, knowledge, understanding, and advocacy of the Salesforce Architectural Domains.

Learn:

• Seek out and apply new technologies and skills in daily work through conferences, online training, reading, participation in organizations and user groups, etc.
• Develop relationships with the business and seek out opportunities for continued education in the financial industry.
• Learn, research, and understand when/where Salesforce platform features could support business outcomes.
• Work on projects outside domain and implement continuously improving processes.

What we look for:

• As a technical leader, you will have the ability to work collaboratively to create direction with technical teams with a history of successful delivery of projects.
• Using emotional intelligence and relationship building, you are comfortable communicating with senior IT leadership, cross-functional technical teams, technology vendors and key stakeholders in the Baird business.
• Demonstrating strong communication skills, you will have the opportunity to mentor and develop other Salesforce Professionals through influencing without authority.
• You will demonstrate effective decision making on architecture and design, utilizing strong requirements analysis skills.
• You will be a leader in change management, creating best practices and delivering projects efficiently and effectively.
• You have demonstrated expertise in object-oriented analysis and design, with a focus on high-quality, timely, and supportable and maintainable code delivery.
• You are comfortable working with iterative development (Agile/SCRUM/TDD methodologies, etc.), you will have an understanding of latest technologies including cloud and mobile strategies and complex application integration.

What makes this opportunity great:

• Information technology is a core part of Baird’s business strategy and plays a critical role in the growth and transformation of the firm.
• Baird IT is a collaborative culture that values diverse backgrounds and perspectives while emphasizing teamwork and a strong sense of partnership.
• Support and flexibility to grow and be your best at work, at home, and in the community.