Job Description
CTH Enterprise Application Architect Rate: Open Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid 2-3 days onsite/week) Duration: 6 months, Contract to Hire Qualifications Bachelor s degree 7+ years combined experience in application development and enterprise architecture (10+ years preferred), including hands on development experience and proven experience designing enterprise scale applications, integration, and data architectures across hybrid on-prem and cloud environments. Hands on application stack experience: Demonstrated deep, practical experience with enterprise application technologies (Java EE/Spring, .NET, application servers, middleware, message brokers, relational and NoSQL databases, caching, workflow engines) Integration & middleware expertise: Proven experience designing and operating ESB/SOA, API gateway, message-oriented middleware, and complex ETL/integration topologies in on-prem or hybrid environments. Application lifecycle & DevOps: Experience with release engineering, CI/CD (on-prem and cloud-hosted), deployment automation, monitoring/observability for multi-tier applications. Practical cloud experience: Demonstrated experience with AWS and/or Azure architectures, including hybrid connectivity, landing zone and multi account/subscription design, and secure cloud controls. Cloud operational skills: Hands on familiarity with cloud IaC and CI/CD tooling and operational patterns (Terraform/ARM/Bicep, GitOps, cloud monitoring), and experience advising on cloud cost optimization and data replication/DR strategies. Troubleshooting & performance: Strong track record leading RCA, performance tuning, profiling, and capacity planning for enterprise systems. Data & governance alignment: Familiarity with data modelling, lineage, and metadata practices to ensure integrations and applications support research and analytics needs Enterprise Architect.docx. Security & compliance: Knowledge of embedding security patterns (IAM, encryption, network segmentation) into application and integration designs to satisfy regulatory and contractual obligations Enterprise Architect.docx. Preferred certifications: Application platform certifications and/or architecture credentials (TOGAF, cloud certs optional, CISSP/CISM/CCSP desirable) Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills; ability to translate technical architecture into actionable guidance for engineering, research, security, and leadership audiences. Experience working with research or data science teams and designing secure, collaborative research environments is highly desirable. Responsibilities Maintain holistic enterprise architectures: document current state and target state architectures for applications, data, and infrastructure across on-prem and multi-cloud environments. Lead hands on application architecture and development work: design, build, optimize, and troubleshoot complex enterprise applications deployed on-prem; advise engineering teams on code, deployment patterns, integration, and best practices. Inventory, dependency mapping & impact analysis: own an authoritative inventory of in-house and commercial applications (owners, interfaces, workflows, lifecycle) and produce/maintain dependency graphs to support change, migration, and incident impact analysis. Middleware, platform & on-prem stack expertise: work closely with application teams on middleware, application servers, databases, message brokers, workflow engines, caching, and related platform components to ensure robustness, scalability, and maintainability. Integration strategy & interoperability: develop and implement enterprise integration strategies (ESB/SOA, API gateways, microservices, event-driven architecture, file transfers, workflow orchestration); standardize APIs, contracts, versioning, and interface governance. Application lifecycle management & operationalization: drive improvements in deployment automation, patching, upgrades, CI/CD for on-prem and hybrid deployments; define runbooks, SLOs/SLAs, monitoring/observability, and provisioning patterns for repeatable operations. Performance tuning & diagnostics: lead root cause analysis and performance optimization for critical applications, including profiling, capacity planning, query tuning, JVM/.NET tuning, and resource optimization. Technology guidance & modernization tradeoffs: provide architecture patterns and technology recommendations for legacy and modernized applications; advise on refactor vs. replatform decisions and interoperability with cloud services. Hybrid cloud enablement: define and maintain repeatable reference patterns for hybrid connectivity, landing zones, multiaccount/subscription design