Senior Solutions Architecture Team Lead

Permanent full-time position

As the professional organization of Alberta teachers, the ATA promotes and advances public education, safeguards standards of professional practice and serves as the advocate for its members. The Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) is proud to retain our status as one of  Alberta’s Top 75 Employers for consecutive years.

We offer

  • 35 hours of work per week, Monday to Friday plus additional paid office closures dates;
  • A full range of 100% employer-paid benefits you and your eligible family members including a health/wellness spending account, dental, vision, extended health care, and employee-family assistance program;
  • Minimum of four (4) weeks of paid vacation, plus multiple other day off categories to support your work/life balance
  • Internal staff committees dedicated to providing wellness, employee engagement, social events/activities for you and your family;
  • Free on-site parking, outdoor patio, cafeteria, library, and multifaith/quiet spaces;
  • Recognition and development programs;
  • Generous training and development budget for continuous staff education and engagement
  • A generous defined benefit pension plan;
  • This position offers a competitive salary range of $93,327 to a maximum of $121,536. Total benefit package is valued at $155,000.

The Opportunity

Reporting to the ITS Director, the Senior Solutions Architecture Team Lead provides technical and functional leadership of all aspects of existing and emerging technology for the Association.  This position works closely with key stakeholders and oversee the gathering of user requirements, develops Solutions Architecture proposals to meet business needs, provides detailed research and design work with a team of technical analysts to provide solutions approved and prioritized by the organization. This position will be responsible for developing solutions and migrating legacy services and applications into a modernized, cloud-based platform that ensures long-term sustainability of these systems. The Team Lead is also responsible for reviewing emerging technologies to proactively apply to services within the Association where major benefits can be achieved. This requires a deep understanding of the existing services within the Association, emerging technologies, and a creative approach to providing these solutions. This position will be responsible for recommending standards, policies, and roadmaps for review by the Director. This includes providing estimates and recommendations for prognosis and emphasis details to start the financial request process, working with the Director to set priorities that are then communicated to Executives and Finance Committee for approval. To successfully deliver on these responsibilities, the Senior Solutions Architecture Team Lead works with a team of specialists with expertise in web, collaboration, infrastructure, cloud services and data/reporting technologies. Specific duties include:

  • Act as lead designer for application and infrastructure projects, focusing on new, mainstream technologies in cloud environments that can provide solutions with as little long-term maintenance required as possible to reduce impact on a small support team;
  • Investigate cloud technologies to find the best fit for ease of use, low maintenance and the most efficient cost possible;
  • Develop subject matter expertise in applicable technologies and share that knowledge with members of the team, encouraging continual learning and experimental investigations to attain higher levels of understanding;
  • Effectively communicate potential solutions to the technical team and the non-technical executive team, finance committee members and staff;
  • Provide consulting support to application specialists, technical architects, application developers, and business analysts within projects and continuous improvement initiatives to ensure the outcomes are aligned with the overall enterprise architecture;
  • Analyze the business-IT environment to detect critical deficiencies, integrations, fit-gap, and downstream impacts to recommend solutions for improvement and transition to operations team to run new and changed services with proper documentation, training and hand-off;
  • Ensure solutions fit within the organization’s security and privacy frameworks;
  • Monitor the solution portfolio to identify deficiencies through aging of the technologies used by the application, or misalignment with business requirements; 
  • Work collaboratively across the enterprise to ensure the execution of plans corresponds with agreed upon outcomes;
  • Work closely with business analysts, project managers, technical analysts, and with business stakeholders in developing and implementing application solutions; 
  • Ensure that the data and reporting infrastructure can support the current and future needs of the Association. This involves reviewing and analyzing IT services performance as well as consulting with stakeholders and reviewing relevant IT technology roadmaps to determine future infrastructure requirements;
  • Build and manage enterprise data models that support the data applications and report/analytical work of the Association;
  • Collaborate with stakeholders to ensure that changes to the data and reporting infrastructure do not interfere with existing processes;
  • Provides overall technology leadership in the planning, implementation, managing, and monitoring of the ATA’s digital properties, including but not limited to the Intranet, the Provincial website, sub-group and local sites, and portals;
  • Establish and co-lead web property governance with appropriate business leadership to ensure that the ATA’s web properties align with brand strategy and meets stakeholder standards and needs;
  • Consult with stakeholders to identify opportunities to leverage AI solutions, Robotic Process Automation and other new technologies to meet the evolving data and analytical needs of the Association;
  • Keep abreast of AI technologies (especially those created/supported by Microsoft) that have the potential to be useful to the Association;
  • Work with a business analyst and architecture team members to optimize manual processes to ensure effective automation of process, leading the implementation of workflows from initiation to completion;
  • Collaborate with Program Areas to support their current and future workflow needs.  This may involve recommending/implementing alternate solutions to the existing processes or extending the systems they currently have;
  • Ensure the ATA’s collaboration technologies remain current and positioned effectively to meet current and future business needs;
  • Ensure the ATA’s collaboration technologies meet internal ATA service-level agreements for performance and up-time;
  • Work with third party service providers to ensure ATA’s web properties are effectively managed and compliant with all relevant security and privacy legislation and internal policy;
  • Coach and develop team members to achieve goals. Celebrate and communicate individual and team successes; and
  • Monitor team activities to insure ongoing alignment with strategic plans and individual goals.

If you have

  • Passion to see change and work towards future improvements;
  • Ability to communicate and present technical materials to non-technical audiences in user-friendly language;
  • Exceptional team and customer service orientation;
  • Personality to coach and develop others;
  • The ability to worth both strategically and operationally; and

And possess

  • A Bachelor’s degree in computer technology or a related field, or equivalent;
  • Being a Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert and having cloud-related certifications are assets;
  • Seven years of experience in deploying new IT solutions and software in a professional setting;
  • Demonstrated technical leadership experience in a professional setting;
  • Experience building cloud solutions and migrations from on-premise to cloud environments;
  • Broad knowledge of information technology data sets, and effective metrics generation and measurement tools;
  • Business analyst experience related to sourcing and analysis of appropriate IT solutions and software
  • Familiarity with project management processes during implementation of IT solutions and oversight of related projects

Please apply by: Submitting a cover letter and resume to HR@ata.ab.ca. Interviews will occur on a continual basis until a suitable candidate is selected.

As a top employer and proud employer partner with the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion, we encourage diversity, creativity, and strive to provide inclusive employee experience.

Contact

Human Resources