Senior Solutions Architect - Digital Innovation - Neenah, WI

Job Description
A growing number of businesses are increasingly relying on Emerging Technologies like Edge computing, IoT/Sensor Networks, Wearables, Voice and Vision recognition and AR/VR-based solutions. When coupled with Cloud integrations and AI/ML Data Analytics capabilities, these solutions can enable new, data-driven insights to help uncover new growth paths. Kimberly-Clark continues to mature its Digital Technology Solutions (DTS) organization, which is expanding the Digital Innovation & Smart Products team to help ideate, design, realize and scale these new digital product opportunities.
As a Solution Architect, and in support of our growing digital products' pipeline, you will have a chance to make a real impact to the business by imagining and inventing the future, co-creating it with our Global Digital Innovation Leads. As part of a small, agile team responsible for technology strategy, design and engineering, this is a critical senior role with direct Technology Solution Architecture accountability for realizing multi-horizon opportunities, infusing human-inspired digital innovation into the life of our market-leading brands, in service of our consumers, customers and the business.
The right person for this role is proactive with stakeholders, a self-starter who can work under broad direction, and is passionate about delivering world-class, first-of-a-kind solutions that split existing and emerging capabilities to bring tangible value. This individual also has the experience and technical background consistent with end-to-end design of digital ecosystems and agile delivery of consumer-facing, hybrid (hardware and software) solutions, including iterative design and rapid prototyping to support MVP, Pilot and Launch activities.
Kimberly-Clark has an amazing opportunity and DTS is poised to deliver compelling digital services, products and solutions. This role will have substantial influence in this endeavor. If you are excited to make a difference applying cutting-edge technologies to solve real business challenges and add value to a global, market-leading organization, please come join us!
Scope/Categories:
Role will report to a Manager or Director in the Digital Innovation & Smart Products team. Role will not have direct reports but is expected to influence & lead/mentor others as needed.
Travel may include approximately 15% of work time.
Key Interfaces
Internal: Global and Regional R&E Leaders, Technical Strategists and Product Development SMEs, Consumer Brand teams; DTS Digital Innovation Leads, BPs, Project Managers, Enterprise & Solution Architects, Functional Engineers, Enterprise Data Management teams, Platform teams, Integration CoE, Infrastructure and CS&A teams, and other Leaders.
External: Contractors, Consulting Partners, 3rd Party service providers, Startups, Academia.
Key Responsibilities:
Leads delivery of overall architecture for Digital Ecosystems and Smart Products.
Guides and contributes to solution designs, in conjunction with technical development and support teams, ensuring a balance between functional and non-functional requirements to deliver business value.
Facilitates the design changes required to take an Innovation MVP (Minimal Viable Product) to a standardized solution that DTS can support and manage.
Leads design of data engineering approaches, ensuring innovation requirements are accounted for and data exists to measure against hypotheses.
Leads as Technical SME for Digital Ecosystem Innovation, and how to leverage data to improve smart products, engagement platforms and digital services.
Coach project teams on Digital Ecosystem/IoT concepts and how to design for success
Works closely with product managers and product developers to translate overall system architecture and product requirements into well-designed and implemented software components and overall solutions for digital products.
Coordinates internal resources and 3rd party, Startups and vendors for project execution.
Executes POCs, develops rapid prototypes and demos, and actively participates in rapid learning activities to help business SMEs understand concepts & direction.
Ensures compliance with safety, regulatory, privacy, and sustainability requirements.
Works with team in the development of detail System Requirements and User Stories.
Works in a fast-paced, agile project environment with small, focused teams. Works with Scrum to provide estimates of project costs and timelines.
Develops & sustains close partnerships with Global R&D and Business SMEs to fully understand demands/future opportunities, evaluating how to engage for value creation.
Partners and aligns with Enterprise Architecture, and identifies approaches and to ensure quality, performance, scalability and supportability of future solutions.
Works in close collaboration with other areas of DTS including but not limited to business partners, capability leads, analytics, and delivery/engineering teams.
Demonstrates flexibility to act as an architect and developer if required.
Collaborates in the definition and maintenance of best practices, templates and processes to meet/exceed the business needs and create re-usable and cost-effective solutions.
Actively partners with Cybersecurity to align and ensure security review, testing, certification, regulatory and privacy activities are completed and in compliance.
Collaboratively provides ongoing technology thought leadership, insights and recommendations for emerging/innovative solutions. Acts as a disruptive change agent fluidly moving between transformation initiatives and day-to-day business as usual.
Required Qualifications and Experiences:
B.S, B. A. . 's in a related field is preferred but not required.
7-10 of equivalent experience in information technology with complex systems design and end-to-end development efforts.
3-5 of experience with Emerging Tech. (IoT, Voice, AR/VR, AI/ML, etc.); hands-on experience in designing and developing consumer-facing digital engagement solutions.
Rapid prototype development, and familiarity with iterative design techniques.
Understanding of full technology stack and proven experience with architectural design patterns including Microservices, APIs, event-driven data flows, serverless, containers, connectivity, device mgmt., etc.
Familiarity with industry security standards and approaches to designing and building secure IoT products, including but not limited to encryption, identity and access management, authentication, authorization, etc. is preferred.
Experienced in designing solutions based on Cloud architectures, platforms and APIs such as Azure IoT Hub, AWS Alexa skills, serverless computing (eg AWS Lambda, Azure Functions), compute (eg Kubernetes containers), Cloud-based databases (eg Azure database), and raw storage (eg storage blobs, S3, etc.).
Knowledge of Cloud data and storage technologies, relational and NoSQL databases, Data flow design, Azure Cosmos DB and blob storage, SQL (PostgreSQL) and NoSQL database systems such as Cassandra/DSE, Mongo.
Understanding of Big Data, Cognitive Services, ML and Data Analytics is preferred.
Experience working with/on Agile and Product teams (eg epics, stories, sprints, backlog management, product owners, product engineers, scrum, etc.).
Ability to liaison between hardware development team(s), software development team(s), and business team(s); comfortable interfacing directly with SMEs.
Proficient in English with excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Experience in a Matrix organization, influencing stakeholders in consultative mode.
Experience working with Outsourcing and Consulting/Contract partners.
Strong facilitation skills required. Must display vision and resiliency.