Job Description

About Evergreen Goodwill

Evergreen Goodwill of Northwest Washington is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 1923 that helps people get jobs across Northwest Washington by offering high-quality free job training, education and job placement. Goodwill empowers individuals to overcome barriers to working, by providing comprehensive support and connecting them with life changing job opportunities, ensuring they are career-ready and can support themselves and their families.

The organization employs over 2,000 people, operates five job-training centers, 23 nonprofit retail stores and more than 27 donation sites in King, Snohomish, Skagit, Whatcom and Kitsap Counties. Every day, Evergreen Goodwill connects people with the jobs, services and skills they need — because Jobs Change Lives. We are committed to creating and sustaining a culture of equity, diversity and inclusion (DEI) and are focused on creating a joyful, inclusive and successful organization.

Enterprise Solutions Architect

Reports to: VP of Technology

Supervises: None

Job Site: Evergreen Goodwill Administration Office, Hybrid 3 days required in office

Band: $145,000 – $155,000

Position Summary

Translates technology strategy into enterprise architecture and technical standards. Accountable for the coherence and long-term consequences of architectural decisions within the direction established with the VP of Technology.

Sets technical planning, architecture review, and release coordination practices across engineering. Advises leadership on sequencing, dependencies, capacity constraints, and technical risk.

Evergreen Goodwill is seeking an Enterprise Solutions Architect. This is an internal-facing, hands-on architecture role — not a pre-sales or customer-facing position.

Technology direction is set with the VP of Technology. Your work is to turn that direction into an architecture the organization can actually build against: the target state, the integration patterns, the standards, and the sequence to get there.

We are in the middle of a substantial platform transformation: automating sort and warehouse operations, migrating identity and productivity platforms, integrating finance systems, and building software in-house where commercial products do not fit how we operate. These initiatives share dependencies. A decision made in identity constrains what is possible in the warehouse; a decision made in finance integration constrains reporting.

You are accountable for making those decisions compose — and for their consequences three years out, not only at deployment. You will write the architecture and the standards down so they outlast any individual, including you. You will be senior enough to say no with a reason, and close enough to the work to be credible when you do.

You will also set how engineering plans and ships: technical planning practice, architecture review, the DevOps pipeline, and release coordination — the air traffic control function for what reaches production and when, across teams running concurrent, interdependent initiatives. Where that work surfaces sequencing conflicts, capacity constraints, or technical risk, you bring it to leadership early enough to act on.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture and technical direction

• Rationalize and articulate the target-state architecture across infrastructure, applications, integration, and data — and the sequenced path from current state to it
• Develop and document platform selection and exit recommendations against explicit criteria — total cost, integration burden, exit cost, security posture, and organizational fit — and own the resulting architecture once the direction is set
• Define integration patterns and interface contracts between systems so teams are not negotiating them case by case
• Maintain architectural decision records stating what was decided, what alternatives were considered, and why — with enough reasoning that a future engineer can tell whether the decision still applies
• Build security, privacy, and compliance requirements into the architecture — PCI scope, data handling, retention, and the access model — rather than bolting them on after a system is built

Engineering standards and practice

• Set and own development, deployment, and lifecycle standards across all three engineering families: source control, environments, release process, configuration management, testing, and operational handoff
• Define what "production-ready" means for internally built software, and hold work to it
• Build the reusable patterns, templates, and reference implementations that let teams move quickly inside the standards rather than around them

Quality, DevOps, and change management

• Own the quality bar for engineering work across the organization: what gets reviewed, what "done" means, and what is allowed to reach production
• Own the build and deployment pipeline — source control practice, branching strategy, automated testing, environment promotion, and release tooling
• Own change management for code and configuration: the change calendar, maintenance windows, rollback criteria, and retail-sensitive freeze periods
• Serve as air traffic control for releases — sequencing and deconflicting changes across concurrent initiatives so two teams do not land breaking work in the same week
• Chair change review. Settle risk and sequencing across teams. What goes to the VP is the question of what the organization should prioritize or is willing to risk — not which approach is technically better
• Own post-incident review for change-induced failures, and feed what is learned back into the standards rather than into a document nobody reads
• Instrument the practice: change failure rate, lead time, rollback frequency, and defect escape. Report on it and use it to argue for changes to how we work
• Set technical planning and architecture review practice across engineering — how work gets scoped, reviewed, and committed to before it starts
• Advise leadership on sequencing, cross-initiative dependencies, capacity constraints, and technical risk, with enough lead time that the advice is still actionable

Business impact, cost, and stakeholder communication

• Evaluate the business consequence of technical choices — cost, operational impact, risk, and what the organization gives up — and put it in front of the people making the call
• Surface problems with existing solutions to the stakeholders who depend on them, before those problems surface themselves
• Keep leadership current on architectural direction, delivery implications, and cost, in language a non-technical executive can act on
• Find and act on cost reduction across the technology estate: license rationalization, redundant or overlapping systems, over-provisioned infrastructure, and contracts that no longer match how we use them

Coherence across teams

• Review cross-cutting technical decisions before they become commitments, and surface conflicts between initiatives early enough to be cheap
• Partner with the engineering managers as a peer — advising their teams, not directing their people
• Break ties on architecture when domains disagree. You are the decision, not a step on the way to one

Documentation and enablement

• Write for the engineer who arrives after you. Documentation is a primary deliverable of this role, not overhead attached to it
• Raise the architectural fluency of the engineering organization through review, teaching, and worked examples
• Develop senior engineers toward architectural work

Hands-on technical work

• Prototype and build reference implementations to prove a pattern before asking teams to adopt it
• Work directly in the systems you are making decisions about. This is not a whiteboard role

Our technical environment

We are not asking you to have used every one of these. We are telling you what you would be working in, so you can judge the fit and we can have a real conversation in the interview.

• Cloud and infrastructure — Microsoft Azure, with virtualization on Proxmox and VMware on premises
• Identity — Entra ID
• Productivity — Microsoft 365
• Business applications — Dynamics 365 Finance and Commerce, being replaced in stages; Dayforce for workforce
• Data — Microsoft Fabric, lakehouse architecture, Power BI, and a semantic layer under active rebuild
• Internal build — web applications and services built in house, including integration and API layers between commercial platforms
• AI — large language models and classification models applied to operational problems, including model selection and evaluation against the task rather than by default
• Engineering practice — Git-based workflow, CI/CD, and infrastructure-as-code in varying stages of maturity

Several of these are mid-migration. Comfort with an estate that is partly legacy, partly rebuilt, and partly undecided matters more here than depth in any one product.

Job-Specific Qualifications

• 12+ years in software engineering, systems engineering, or solution architecture, including 5+ years explicitly accountable for architecture spanning multiple systems or teams. This is the threshold requirement for the role — total tenure without that accountability will not substitute for it
• Demonstrated ownership of a target-state architecture at organizational scope, with evidence of having driven it to adoption — not only designed it
• Deep systems integration experience: API design, interface contracts, event and message patterns, and the failure modes of each
• Experience defining and rolling out engineering standards across teams that do not report to you. This is the core difficulty of the role and we will probe it directly
• Demonstrated ownership of CI/CD, release practice, and change management across more than one team — including the judgment calls about what ships and when
• Production experience architecting on a major cloud platform — Azure preferred, AWS or GCP acceptable — including cost, identity, networking, and the tradeoffs between managed services and self-hosted
• Current hands-on experience with modern application and API frameworks, sufficient to review a design and write code that other engineers take seriously
• Working knowledge of data platform architecture: warehouse or lakehouse design, pipeline patterns, and the difference between a semantic layer that holds up and one that does not
• Practical experience applying AI to production problems — model selection and evaluation against a task, retrieval and classification patterns, and a clear view of where these approaches fail
• Experience running change review or a comparable forum where sequencing and risk get arbitrated between teams with competing deadlines
• Hands-on software development experience current enough to be credible with practicing engineers — able to read and write production code, not only review architecture
• Experience making build-versus-buy decisions and living with the consequences of both
• Clear technical writing, plus the ability to explain a technical tradeoff to a non-technical executive audience without flattening it
• Experience in an environment where the architecture is partly inherited and cannot be replaced wholesale

Other / Preferred Qualifications

• Retail, logistics, warehouse operations, or another environment with physical operations and frontline staff
• Organizations running internal software development alongside commercial platforms
• Nonprofit, public sector, or mission-driven experience, or comparable experience under real budget constraint
• Identity and access architecture, point-of-sale or payment systems, ERP integration, or data platform architecture — depth in one with working knowledge across the others is more useful here than breadth alone
• Contribution to security and compliance standards, including PCI
• Experience with change control in an environment with seasonal freeze periods or revenue-sensitive release windows
• Familiarity with delivery and quality metrics — change failure rate, lead time, rollback frequency — used to drive practice rather than to report upward

What we are deliberately not asking for

• People management experience. No direct reports; not a step toward management. This is the top of the individual contributor track
• Specific vendor certifications. Platforms in our current environment are examples, not requirements — we are replacing several of them
• Pre-sales or customer-facing solution architecture. Different discipline; this role is entirely internal

Minimum Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, or a related field. Demonstrated architectural work carries more weight than credentials.

Minimum Years of Relevant Experience

12+ years, including 5+ in an architecture-accountable role.

Everyone Is Welcome

When you join Evergreen Goodwill, you join a truly vibrant community. We value the things that make us different and unique. From diverse international and ethnic backgrounds, to languages, identities, ages, orientations, and beyond, Evergreen Goodwill celebrates individual and cultural diversity.

Why work at Evergreen Goodwill?

A health plan that includes medical, dental, vision and prescription coverage

100% Employer-paid life, accidental death and dismemberment (AD&D), and long term disability insurance (for salaried employee)

Voluntary supplemental coverage for life, accident, illness, and short- and long-term disability

Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) Plan

Roth and 403(b) Retirement Savings Plan program

Paid vacation, (9) holiday and sick time

Limited paid time off for Jury Duty and Bereavement Leave

Employee discounts

Employee referral bonus

Employee Assistance Program (EAP)

Mentorship Program

Career Advancement Opportunities

Paid Job Training

EEO Statement: Evergreen Goodwill of Northwest Washington is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, sex, national origin, age, disability, marital status, citizenship, military status, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, veteran status, or other protected characteristics in accordance with applicable law. This policy applies to all aspects of employment, including hiring, compensation, benefits, and termination.

This document does not represent a contract of employment, and EGNW reserves the right to change this job description and/or assign tasks for the employee to perform, as EGNW may deem appropriate.