Technical Architect III

Technical Architect

The Information Technology Department at the Wisconsin Historical Society manages the technology and computer infrastructure that drives the Agency’s business systems and automation requirements. The IT department maintains and implements systems and web applications that support the business needs and mission of the Wisconsin Historical Society. Under the general supervision of the Chief Information Officer the Technical Architect will play a critical role in designing, implementing, and maintaining robust and scalable technical solutions across various domains.

This role requires expertise in cloud technologies, digital asset management, and integration strategies. It will support close collaboration with cross-functional teams to drive innovation and ensure seamless system performance.

This role is responsible for defining and implementing short and long-term strategic goals for managing and maintaining systems and software, and ensuring that all planned and in-place system architectures are aligned with the Agency’s goals.

While designing, creating and monitoring the implementation of end-to-end integrated systems, this role must promote a balanced and focused development of systems and their maintenance no matter if requirements change.

They review new and existing system designs and make recommendations for improving or altering the systems.

This role may be involved in negotiating and administering vendor and consultant contracts.

The Technical Architect consults with department heads and end-users to further infrastructure development.

They develop and execute test plans to check technical performance of infrastructure and report findings.

Based on findings, they make recommendations for improvement.

They develop and recommend policies to leadership for standardizing systems.

This key role is a team lead that influences policy, strategy, staffing, and priorities for the team and agency, they also aid the Chief Information Officer in managing developer and analyst workloads and are a technical and functional resource when issues are escalated from various channels across the IT team.

This is not a supervisory position.

This role provides expertise and architectural assistance to other WHS IT, DOA Division of Enterprise Technology, and vendor personnel including software teams, Analysts, and Engineers.

The Technical Architect conducts research on new technologies in the field of systems development and creates and develops plans for investing in such systems that will increase cost effectiveness, mission effectiveness, and flexibility.

Responsibilities:

System Architecture and Integrations:

• Architect and oversee integrations between various systems (e.g. e-commerce, membership/CRM, email marketing, point of sales, DAMS, and other web platforms).
• Interface with users, project sponsors, and all other stakeholders in order to determine their evolving needs
• Develop APIs, middleware, and data pipelines to enable seamless data flow.
• Ensure data consistency and integrity across integrated systems.
• Implement, support, and mature a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) and related integrations to establish a single source of truth for digital assets and metadata.
• Creating architectural documentation ranging from a very high level conceptual design to a more detailed specification. Includes conceptual and logical data models, mappings, context diagrams, process architecture models and data flows.
• Maintain system architecture that integrates key systems including web CMS, DAM, and collections management systems
• In partnership with internal and external design and development teams, implement and maintain a state-of-the-art website, integrated with DAMS.
• Ensure relevant operational and collections-oriented data readily available to report on via Tableau
• Identify and activate a Digital Preservation solution for Collections data and state records.
• Implement a scalable storage architecture that can accommodate collections growth and preservation.
• Plan, design, and request server infrastructure that aligns with project requirements and future scalability.
• Partitioning large systems into successive layers…