The Systems Architect will report to the VP of Architecture. The Systems Architect will be required to define the linkages and characteristic profiles of the existing suite of products used at weather.com. Using this information, and working with the rest of the Architecture team, the Systems Architect will interact with the Marketing Team to understand the Customer Requirements that exist. Using the gathered business requirements the systems architect will translate them into I/T requirements, investigate, research, and provide recommendations to the Architecture team of hardware/software products that could address the business requirements. The designed solution must be capable of providing flexibility, function and performance, scale and manageability, and future ease of reuse.
The systems architect will be challenged to ensure that a balance exists between Marketing Requirements, as they relate to an integrated software solution, and weather.com’s tactical and strategic architecture.
Responsible for providing a multi-site transactional infrastructure environment, which is critical to weather.com’s transition from a flat file site to a transactional site.
Provide assessment of impact of marketing requirements / changes to the operational, application development and user experience environments.
Work with the respective business development, product creation, marketing and development teams to develop and maintain a infrastructure that is common across all product initiatives.
Research and analyze new hardware/software products and tools by which to enable greater flexibility, performance and rapid application development of the weather.com site. In the process, design choices must documented and metrics developed to assess individual products.
Provide leadership in design and development of policy, standards, design guiding principles and processes regarding implementation of software, application, and infrastructure technology.
Develop, maintain and implement strategies for backup/recovery, management, and optimization.
Work synergistically with the other architects to provide an end to end solution, other organizations to provide a complete implementation and developers to ensure design principles are adhered to.
Provide tactical and strategic recommendations on future versions of the Weather.com’s site architecture. This certainly will include thought leadership in infrastructure hardware, software, middleware, and operating systems.
Engage with Industry experts to maintain and expand current knowledge base. This is necessary to ensure thought leadership and thought experiments required to design tightly coupled high performance solutions.
BS in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent experience.
10 to 12 years of IT experience in infrastructure deployment.
5 years of experience in Internet Exploitation of infrastructure transactional systems.
Industry recognized infrastructure architecture certification.
Project Management expertise.
Must demonstrate knowledge base in web related technology and tools.
Must demonstrate ability to view enterprise through a web enabled product definition.
Must demonstrate capability to think in E-Speak while executing in legacy infrastructures.
Must be conversant and knowledgeable in Web communication protocols.
Must have experience in high transaction volume web site infrastructure designs and implementations.
Must have experience in design techniques for geographically disperse infrastructures.
Must have experience in designing system and network management solutions.
Must have experience in performance management, capacity planning, and storage management.
Must have experience in designing a highly available (24x7) infrastructure.
Must have experience in Industry design Methodologies and practices.
Must understand implications of various application designs on the infrastructure.
Must be have designed solutions with multiple hardware providers: SUN, EMC, Intel, CISCO, Foundry.
Must have experience dealing with Vendor as well as Home Grown Application software.
Must demonstrate capabilities of articulating business requirements into technology specification.
Must be capable of logical and physical infrastructure designs.
Must be capable of infrastructure optimization, partitioning, and creating scaleable environments.
Must be fluent in TCP/IP, routers, switches, load balancing, firewall, caches, servers and storage networks.
Must be fluent in UNIX, Netscape, Apache, LDAP, SNMP Managers, DNS, SMTP and SNMP.
Must be capable of operating with multiple OS: UNIX, NT, LINUX and FreeBSD.
Must be able to use standard scripting languages.
Must be able to communicate with C-Level Executives effectively.
Must mentor developers through difficult infrastructure design aspects.
Must be able to communicate infrastructure design criteria to application and content developers.
Must be process focused.
