Solutions Architect

Overview LSAC’s mission is to advance law and justice by promoting access, equity, and fairness in law school admission and supporting the learning journey from prelaw through practice. Pay rate: $160,000 to $173,000, depending on experience The Solutions Architect is responsible for designing and delivering scalable, secure, and high-performing technology solutions that align with LSAC business and mission objectives. This role bridges business needs and technical execution by translating requirements into architectural designs, ensuring systems are resilient, efficient, and future-ready. You will partner with product management, engineering teams, and the Director of Software Architecture to translate business goals into shipped software, with a particular focus on closing three gaps in our current operating model: increasing DevOps capacity, establishing infrastructure-as-code (IaC) as a first-class practice, and uplifting the patterns we use to support production systems. This is a senior individual contributor role: you will spend most of your time writing code – application code, IaC, deployment pipelines, and observability instrumentation – and the remainder shaping architecture, mentoring engineers, and partnering with peers across Cloud Architecture, SRE, and Product. Responsibilities Essential Job Functions Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of this position. The individual employed in this position will be required to: Lead the design and hands-on implementation of Azure-based solutions, with a core focus on reusability, scalability, fault-tolerance, and security. Author production code (.NET Core, React, services, APIs) – not just diagrams. Define and enforce patterns by building reference implementations rather than describing them. Establish infrastructure-as-code (IaC) as a foundational: build the initial modules, set the standards (e.g., Bicep or Terraform), and partner with teams to migrate existing infrastructure into version-controlled, peer-reviewed deployments. Design and build CI/CD pipelines and developer tooling that allows development teams to ship safely and frequently with minimal manual intervention. Stand up the production-support at scale: observability and SLOs, alerting, runbooks, on-call rotations, incident response practices, and post-incident reviews. Partner with the SRE team and support engineering to operationalize these patterns and uplift the current model where gaps exist. Lead the response to high-severity production issues; debug across the stack – front-end, services, data stores, and infrastructure – and ship the fix or mitigation. Design and implement microservices and APIs with thoughtfully defined contracts; build reusable components and libraries that other teams adopt. Provide technical leadership and code review across multiple agile teams (back-end, front-end, full-stack); raise the bar for quality, testability, and operational readiness. Collaborate with Cloud Architecture on Azure landing zones, networking, and identity to ensure platform-level decisions translate cleanly into application-level ones. Partner with product management to translate roadmap objectives into pragmatic technical plans, including MVP framing, sequencing, and trade-offs. Evaluate third-party tools and platforms; produce written recommendations grounded in technical assessment, cost, and operational impact. Communicate architectural decisions, trade-offs, and risks clearly in writing (architectural decision records, design docs, short proposals) and verbally to stakeholders ranging from engineers to senior leaders. Continuously look for and implement improvements in software delivery, platform reliability, and developer experience. Champion practical Gen-AI adoption: coach and mentor engineers on AI-assisted development (e.g., GitHub Copilot and Copilot Chat), prompt design, AI-augmented code review, and AI-accelerated test generation. Establish team-wide prompting standards and review practices for AI-generated code, and lead by example by using these tools in your own day-to-day work. Architect Generative AI capabilities as needed, including LLM integrations, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agentic patterns; embed Responsible AI practices (content safety, PII handling, evaluation, audit logging) into the architecture from day one. Competencies Strong written and verbal communication skills. Holds a strong sense of accountability for both individual and team objectives. Embraces a forward-thinking mindset, contributing to a culture of continuous improvement and creativity. Excellent time management, prioritization, attention to detail and organization skills Bias for shipping: prefers writing code, IaC, and runbooks over slides and meetings, and demonstrates impact through working software in production. Deep, hands-on experience with Azure services (e.g., App Service, AKS or Container Apps, API Management, Service Bus, Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, Key Vault, Application Insights / Log Analytics). Strong .NET Core and modern web (React) skills, with a track record of authoring production code in scale environments. Proven experience defining and operating IaC (Bicep, Terraform, or ARM) as code: module design, peer review, drift detection, and environment promotion. Strong fluency with CI/CD systems (Azure DevOps Pipelines or GitHub Actions), automated testing, source control workflows, and release engineering. Strong understanding of microservices, decoupled systems, asynchronous messaging, API design, identity, and zero-trust security patterns. Strong understanding of relational and document data stores (Cosmos DB, SQL Server, Oracle). Practical site reliability engineering experience: SLOs/SLIs, observability (logs, metrics, traces), incident command, error-budget thinking, and blameless postmortems. Comfortable working in agile environments (Scrum or Kanban) and challenging teams constructively to improve their ways of working. Servant-leadership orientation; values the success of the team over personal credit. Calm under production pressure; able to make crisp, well-communicated decisions during incidents. Demonstrated production use of AI-assisted development tooling (e.g., GitHub Copilot in VS Code or JetBrains, Copilot Chat) and a track record of helping peers adopt it effectively and responsibly. Working knowledge of Generative AI architectures: Azure OpenAI Service, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector search (e.g., Azure AI Search, pgvector), prompt engineering, and evaluation frameworks. Able to translate AI hype into pragmatic, incremental delivery. Familiarity with Responsible AI principles — content safety, PII handling, bias evaluation, audit logging — and the ability to enforce them at the architecture level. Qualifications Education and Experience 10+ years of progressive experience designing and building large-scale, cloud-native platforms, with at least 3 years in a senior or lead architecture role. Demonstrable track record of hands-on engineering – not solely architecture diagrams – supported by code samples, prior production systems, or other concrete evidence. Production experience with Azure, .NET Core, and React (or comparable modern web stack). Experience leading the introduction or maturation of infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD practices in an organization. Experience standing up or significantly maturing site reliability engineering, platform engineering, or production-support practices in a mid-sized engineering organization. B.A. or B.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience. (preferred) Azure certifications such as Azure Solutions Architect Expert or DevOps Engineer Expert. (preferred) Experience in EdTech, higher education, or other regulated or compliance-sensitive domains. (preferred) Coursework, certifications, or verifiable project experience in applied AI/ML, natural language processing, or LLM application development (e.g., AI-102 Azure AI Engineer Associate, Azure OpenAI certification, DeepLearning.AI). (preferred) Supervisory Responsibilities This role does not have people management responsibilities Position Type The LSAC standard business hours are Monday-Friday, 8:30 a.m. - 4:45 p.m. ET. While these are the standard office hours for LSAC, as an exempt employee, the employee will be expected to work the hours necessary to satisfactorily complete their assignments in a responsible and professional manner. Work Environment This job operates in a remote and professional office environment. Whether remote or in-office, this role routinely uses standard office equipment such as computers, phones, photocopiers, filing cabinets and fax machines. Travel Requirements Up to 5% of travel is required for this position for occasional team off-sites or in-person collaboration. P hysical Demands The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. While performing the duties of this job, the employee must regularly write, read, and communicate effectively Additional Information: Please note that this job description may not contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Job responsibilities may change at any time with or without notice. Except as otherwise provided by law, all terms of employment are subject on an at-will basis and can change at any time. At LSAC we foster a culture based on our stated values and actively seek to broaden our pipeline of current and future leaders. We are committed to attracting, retaining, and developing individuals who have a passion for the work they do and the mission of LSAC. We encourage all qualified individuals to apply. We recognize that experience comes from a variety of places and know that job applicants will possess many, but not necessarily all, of the qualities listed in the job description. While no one candidate will embody every single quality, the successful candidate will exemplify a robust combination of the skills and competencies listed to excel in the position. LSAC is an Equal Opportunity Employer and welcomes applications from individuals from all identities and backgrounds.