The Release Train Architect provides technical leadership and guidance to a value-oriented release train comprised of multiple delivery teams. As a part of the Release Train Leadership Team, the Release Train Architect works with engineering, product, and business leaders to create and promote the release train’s current architectural direction and future vision.

Job Summary:

We know you’ve got choices as an experienced Architect, so why work for Cox Automotive? Besides being a privately held company that’s been in business for over 100 years, Cox Automotive is a respected industry leader.

The Release Train Architect provides technical leadership and guidance to a value-oriented release train comprised of multiple delivery teams. As a part of the Release Train Leadership Team, the Release Train Architect works with engineering, product, and business leaders to create and promote the release train’s current architectural direction and future vision.

Key responsibilities include ensuring technical alignment, architectural health and vision across the release train’s agile delivery teams. The Architecture team accomplishes our goals by:

• Defining and socializing future state vision

• Understanding technical and business dependencies

• Understanding and communicating broader architectural context

• Promoting leading practices to drive architectural health and high quality

• Creating Technical Proof of Concepts validating architectural/design patterns for engineering

• Defining, assessing, and communicating technical debt and risk

• Guiding architectural decisions

• Analyzing design and technology alternatives with respect to business benefits

• Applying emerging technology to business opportunities

• Promoting a culture of mentoring, collaboration and sharing

Successful Release Train Architects are able to communicate effectively on both technical and business fronts. Validating technology assumptions and quantifying value, effort, risk and technical feasibility in terms of time and money is a critical skill for this role. Release Train Architects must understand the technology landscape of their domain and be able to collaborate with their peers to promote standards, patterns and re-usability to enable the development of best-in-class solutions. Architecture has an important role in our business. We strive to enable a sustainable, continuous, accelerating flow of exceptional solutions to the market.

Skills and Experience:

• Demonstrating a strong ability to collaborate with others. Working in concert with engineering, product and business leaders. Resolve design pattern conflicts between teams when necessary to ensure architectural alignment

• Forming educated opinions about the evolution of our architecture practice. Illustrate and evangelize technical and product vision through creating architectural artifacts such as roadmaps, diagrams, leading practices documents, maturity models and technical analysis presentations

• Work with architecture and engineering team members to author guiding principles to better inform teams' design decisions

• Understand technical risks and technical debt. Working transparently to bring visibility to these items is critical, as is developing appropriate mitigation strategies

• Continuous learning: staying current with technology that is relevant to our problem/solution space

• Evaluating current and future work-streams for opportunities to leverage preferred technology patterns and solutions (such as Gen AI and Amazon Web Services) in reusable patterns. Release Train Architects should always be thinking about new ways to employ AWS to create scalable, cost effective and inventive solutions

• Share what our teams are learning and doing! Cox Automotive wins when we leverage our collective learnings and we're intentional about sharing great work

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in a related field and 8+ years of experience or a Master's degree and 6 years or Ph.D. and 3 years in full development life cycle and significant experience in delivering applications and architecture services in a production environment

• 3+ years’ experience working with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• 2+ years leadership/influencing experience

• Experience developing software in one or more programming languages (Java, C#, JavaScript, Python, etc.)

• Prior experience in the implementation of design and architecture processes in an Enterprise Agile Environment

• Prior experience in IT architecture in large-scale, complex IT environments

• Experience working in automation first environments promoting Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery and infrastructure as code

• A solid understanding of the architecture of consumer-scale web solutions, distributed systems integration and cloud computing platforms

• A strong record of being able to learn new technologies and apply them to business needs

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Management of Information Systems, or related field OR equivalent work experience

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience architecting solutions using no-code/low-code platforms, particularly Salesforce

• Understanding of ERP systems architecture and integration patterns, with NextWorld experience

• Ability to evaluate and recommend appropriate use cases for no-code/low-code solutions versus custom development

• Experience with B2B integrations