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.

Sr. Solutions Engineer

Reports to: Director, Technology

Supervises: None

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

Salary Range: $90,000 – $100,000

Position Summary

Evergreen Goodwill is seeking a Sr. Solutions Engineer to own a domain of the systems our organization runs on — the platforms, integrations, and automations that keep a 2,000-person nonprofit operating across 26 locations.

This is an internal-facing engineering role, not a pre-sales position. You will take ownership of a set of business-critical systems: how they are designed, how they connect to everything else, and how they behave when something breaks.

We are modernizing much of our technology estate. You will be designing and building replacements, not maintaining a finished stack — and you will own the standards for how that work gets done in your domain.

This is a senior individual contributor role with real decision authority. You will work directly with the business areas you support, and you will be the person who decides how the systems in your domain fit together.

Where your authority sits. You decide within the systems you own. Standards that span domains — how your systems talk to everyone else's, how things get deployed and changed — sit with our Enterprise Solutions Architect, and you help shape them. Inside your domain, the calls are yours.

Key Responsibilities

Domain ownership

• Own the architecture and forward plan for a domain of business-critical systems
• Own the integrations between your domain and the rest of the enterprise estate — finance, workforce, inventory, and reporting
• Own configuration standards, release practice, and operational handoff for your domain, working within enterprise architecture standards

Build and integration

• Design, build, and deploy integrations, automations, and configuration across the domain
• Own production codebases where the domain includes internally built software
• Build AI into the systems you own where it earns its place — classification, extraction, retrieval, and language-model services wired into real workflows, with evaluation against the task rather than adoption by default
• Tier 3 diagnosis for the systems you own — the escalation point, not an escalation path

Reliability and operations

• Own reliability and service levels for the systems in your domain, including monitoring, alerting, and incident response
• Design the operational handoff so systems support teams can run what you build
• Participate in change and maintenance windows, including business-sensitive timing

Stakeholder partnership

• Partner directly with the business areas you support. Translate operational need into system capability without a translator in between
• Say no with a reason and an alternative when a request would compromise reliability or integrity
• Manage vendor relationships for platforms in the domain, including evaluation and selection input

Multiplication

• Raise the capability of the solution engineering team through review, standards, and teaching
• Mentor less experienced engineers, including on the domain you own
• Document your work so someone else can carry it

Job-Specific Qualifications

• 8+ years in solution engineering, systems integration, business systems, or software engineering
• Demonstrated ownership of a platform or system domain — the architecture, the standards, and the consequences when it breaks. Not contribution to someone else's domain. This is the threshold requirement and we will probe it directly: what you owned, what you decided, what you were accountable for
• Evidence you set technical practice that other engineers followed — configuration standards, integration patterns, release discipline, or review practice adopted by people who did not report to you
• Current hands-on development. You should be able to read a codebase, write production code, and be credible in a technical design review. Configuration-only backgrounds will not clear this bar
• Ownership of a production codebase or internally built service, including what happened when it failed
• Production experience building with AI, not just using it. Large language models or classification models integrated into a working system — prompt and context design, retrieval patterns, structured output, and evaluation. You should be able to explain how you measured whether the model was actually right, and where the approach broke down
• Judgment about when AI is the wrong tool. We are looking for someone who has shipped it and also killed it
• Deep systems integration experience: API design, interface contracts, message and event patterns, and the failure modes of each
• Experience delivering work that required another department to change how it operates
• Experience owning reliability for an operationally critical system, including on-call and incident response
• Clear written communication, and the ability to explain a technical constraint to a non-technical audience without hand-waving
• Experience in an environment where systems are being replaced rather than maintained

Other / Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in an environment with physical operations and frontline staff — retail, logistics, warehousing, manufacturing, or similar
• ERP, finance, workforce management, or point-of-sale system experience
• Payment processing or PCI-scoped system experience
• Operational or industrial automation experience
• Experience with internally built software alongside commercial platforms
• Agentic or tool-using AI systems in production — orchestration, guardrails, human-in-the-loop design
• Model selection and cost/performance tradeoff analysis across providers
• Computer vision or automated classification applied to physical operations
• Nonprofit, public sector, or mission-driven experience
• Experience mentoring less experienced engineers

What we are deliberately not asking for

• People management experience. No direct reports. This is a senior individual contributor seat on a technical ladder that continues above it
• Specific vendor certifications. Platforms in our current environment are examples, not requirements
• Pre-sales or customer-facing solutions engineering. Different discipline; this role is entirely internal

Minimum Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, engineering, or a related field — or equivalent professional experience.

Minimum Years of Relevant Experience

8+ years.

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.