Senior Advanced Solutions Architect - Data Platforms

The Solution Architect will partner closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, Technical Leads, and Data/Software Engineers to design and enable Data Platform capabilities that advance Kroger's Data and AI strategy.

Reporting to the Sr. Director of Data Platforms, this role is responsible for ensuring the successful delivery of platform capabilities through the effective application of Kroger Architecture Principles, standards, and shared engineering practices. The architect will evaluate the fitness and strategic alignment of existing platform capabilities, collaborate with engineering teams to identify required enhancements, and drive solution optimization efforts that improve scalability, reliability, security, performance, and operational efficiency.

This role requires a balance of strategic thinking, technical depth, and practical execution, with a focus on enabling modern, AI-ready platform capabilities across the enterprise.

Partner closely with development, senior product management, architecture, information security & infrastructure teams within a large organization to deliver software & technology products that meet functional & non-functional requirements & produce desired business outcomes. Curate & adhere to architectural principles & associated processes for adopting new technology or integrating with a new third-party solution. Advise senior product management on technology specific aspects of product strategy development & adopt emerging technology appropriate to stated goals. Mentors junior solutions architecture staff on architectural principles & methods. Demonstrate the company's core values of respect, honesty, integrity, diversity, inclusion and safety.

• Develop the overall software & deployment architecture of application solutions across several teams within a large organization
• Partner with 3rd party vendors to integrate capabilities as required by the solution under development
• Present opportunities with cost/benefit analysis to leadership in order to shape sound architectural decisions
• Lead the discovery phase of large projects to develop high level architecture & design
• Draft, review & maintain architectural diagrams, interface specifications & other architectural artifacts as required by the delivery teams to clearly communicate the needs of the solution under development
• Interact with & present to senior engineering & product management with the presence to influence & drive the decision makers to a solution
• Identify key technology overlaps & gaps; formulate strategies to optimize technology spend
• Provide technical leadership to ensure clarity between ongoing projects & the strategic objectives of the company
• Assess emerging technologies & make appropriate recommendations based on business needs
• Mentor team members & Solutions Architects in software development principles, patterns, processes & practices
• Promote the capture & reuse of intellectual capital, including code objects & components
• Must be able to perform the essential job functions of this position with or without reasonable accommodation

• Applying strong critical thinking and sound technical judgment to complex business and technology decisions.

• Maintaining awareness of emerging technologies, industry trends, and evolving software engineering practices.

• Identifying and applying AI, generative AI, and agentic capabilities to solve business and platform challenges.

• Designing interface-first solutions and modern microservices architectures utilizing both synchronous and asynchronous communication patterns.

• Applying data modeling, master data management, and information architecture best practices.

• Selecting and implementing appropriate relational (SQL) and non-relational (NoSQL) data technologies based on business and technical requirements.

• Balancing long-term architectural strategy with pragmatic delivery needs.

• Leading architecture design reviews and technical discussions that are efficient, collaborative, and outcome-focused.

• Communicating complex technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences, including executive leadership.

• Building alignment and consensus among diverse stakeholders to solve challenging architectural and organizational problems.

• Creating clear architecture artifacts, including C4 models, sequence diagrams, system context diagrams, and solution blueprints.

• Developing high-level estimates for implementation effort, infrastructure investment, operational expenditures, cloud consumption, and AI-related costs.

• Driving alignment with enterprise architecture standards, security requirements, operational excellence practices, and platform engineering principles.

• Deep knowledge of modern data technologies such as Kafka, IBM MQ, and Databricks.

Minimum

• Bachelor's Degree Computer science or another related technical field
• Any expertise/experience in business case development, product scoping & project planning with development teams
• Any strong performance management experience of large work groups
• Any delivered innovative results in previous roles demonstrating strong knowledge of industry trends & industry competition
• Any experience integrating open source technologies in high volume production environments with strong knowledge of agile methodology
• 7+ years experience taking a lead role in the successful delivery of complex software & automation systems
• 12+ years experience in software/infrastructure development domain with emphasis on utilizing design patterns & architectural principles to ensure timely delivery of quality solutions

Desired

• Master's Degree Computer science, information systems, or related technical field
• Any experience developing/architecting public cloud-hosted backend services with Azure/GCP
• 5+ years experience in designing eCommerce applications & working on high volume internet scale solutions
• Any experience developing React, Swift (iOS), Kotlin (Android)
• Any experience developing/designing a scalable microservices architecture in Go, Java and Node.js