Sr Architect I at Staples in Framingham, MA

Job description

Team Summary: Staples Digital Solutions partners across the enterprise to shape and deliver scalable technology that strengthens customer, sales, and service capabilities. The team works closely with business leaders, product teams, engineers, architects, vendors, and external partners to modernize platforms, improve customer experiences, and advance strategic business priorities through secure, resilient, and innovative solutions. Role Summary: The Sr. Architect leads architecture and technical evolution within the customer service domain, guiding the contact center’s transition from a traditional, agent-led service model to an AI-first operating model. The architect designs solutions that combine conversational AI, intelligent business process automation, and human expertise to address customer needs across email, voice, and digital channels. This is a hands-on architecture role responsible for translating business goals into practical designs, validating technology choices, and guiding implementation from discovery through production. The architect will ensure that modernization improves customer experience, equips employees, and delivers measurable business value. What you’ll be doing: Lead the architecture and technical design supporting the contact center modernization journey to an AI-first operating model. Drive the delivery of solutions that advance our AI-first operating model, increase agent productivity, and deliver an elevated customer experience. Develop target-state architectures, reference models, standards, and reusable design patterns. Define application, integration, API, cloud, and data architecture strategies aligned with business objectives. Evaluate technology solutions and recommend approaches based on scalability, reliability, security, performance, and cost. Design and govern enterprise integrations, APIs, event-driven architectures, and service-oriented solutions. Assess emerging technologies, generative AI capabilities, automation opportunities, and modernization strategies. Lead architecture reviews, proofs of concept, strategic technology assessments, design workshops, and governance forums. Mentor architects and engineers while promoting architecture best practices, knowledge sharing, and technical excellence. What you bring to the table: Strong strategic thinking and the ability to connect technology decisions to business outcomes. Exceptional problem-solving and analytical skills, with the ability to address complex challenges. Ability to influence and lead across matrixed organizations without direct authority. Excellent written, verbal, presentation, and stakeholder-management skills. Strong collaboration skills and the ability to build trusted partnerships across the organization. A continuous-learning mindset with a passion for innovation, technology trends, and improvement. What’s needed - Basic Qualifications: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field. 7+ years of software engineering experience, including designing solution architectures and providing technical leadership throughout solution development and delivery. Expertise in designing and building enterprise applications using Java (Spring Boot, Spring Cloud) and front-end technologies such as Angular, JavaScript, and TypeScript. This includes applying reactive UI patterns and using state management and component libraries. Extensive experience designing, securing, and governing REST, GraphQL, and event-driven APIs using Kafka, Solace, or similar technologies. This experience includes API gateway management, OpenAPI/AsyncAPI contracts, OAuth2/OIDC, and API versioning strategies. Proven ability to define target-state architectures for multi-application suites using microservices, domain-driven design, and cloud-native design patterns. Experience with cloud platforms (Azure, GCP, AWS), container technologies (Docker, Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines. Working knowledge of custo