Enterprise Solutions Architect

Simon & Schuster was named to Forbes magazine list of America's Best Mid-Size Employers 2022. Simon & Schuster is a global leader in general interest publishing, dedicated to providing the best in fiction and nonfiction for readers of all ages, and in all printed, digital and audio formats. Its distinguished roster of authors includes many of the world's most popular and widely recognized writers, and winners of the most prestigious literary honors and awards. It is home to numerous well-known imprints and divisions such as Simon & Schuster, Scribner, Atria Books, Gallery Books, Pocket Books, Adams Media, Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing and Simon & Schuster Audio and international companies in Australia, Canada, India and the United Kingdom, and proudly brings the works of its authors to readers in more than 200 countries and territories. For more information visit our website at www.simonandschuster.com.


We are seeking an Enterprise Solutions Architect to provide technical leadership and hands-on architectural direction for critical systems within our book publishing organization.
This role is deeply focused on understanding, stabilizing, and modernizing long-standing legacy platforms that support business-critical processes. The successful candidate will lead architectural initiatives that balance operational continuity with incremental modernization, ensuring these core systems can safely evolve to support modern integration, analytics, and cloud-based capabilities.
With 15+ years of experience, the ideal candidate brings deep architectural fluency in enterprise systems, strong supply chain domain knowledge, and experience guiding hybrid environments that span mainframe-era platforms and modern cloud technologies.


Key Responsibilities
Architecture & Modernization
• Evolve the architecture of legacy COBOL and .NET-based supply chain systems, including warehousing, inventory management, distribution, order fulfillment, and financial platforms.
• Develop a deep architectural understanding of existing applications, batch jobs, data structures, and integration points.
• Lead efforts to stabilize, optimize, modernize and extend legacy systems, defining phased approaches that may include refactoring, encapsulation, re-platforming, or selective replacement.
Legacy System Design & Integration
• Design architectures that integrate online and batch-driven systems with modern ERP platforms, cloud services, and third-party logistics providers.
• Drive initiatives such as:
◦ API and service layers over existing legacy applications
◦ Decomposition of monolithic systems into domain-aligned capabilities
◦ Transition from file-based and overnight batch processing to event-driven or near–real-time patterns where appropriate
Governance, Risk & Operational Stability
• Establish and maintain architecture standards specific to legacy systems, including documentation, dependency mapping, and design reviews.
• Identify and mitigate risks related to aging codebases, batch scheduling dependencies, data consistency, and operational fragility.
• Ensure architectural decisions support reliability, recoverability, auditability, and compliance requirements for core supply chain operations.
Collaboration & Delivery Enablement
• Work closely with engineers, legacy system specialists, and supply chain operations teams to ensure architectures are practical, executable, and well understood.
• Support implementation teams by reviewing designs, guiding modernization sequencing, and resolving cross-system integration challenges.
• Translate supply chain requirements into clear architectural designs grounded in the realities of existing platforms.
Technical Leadership & Knowledge Transfer
• Promote best practices in system modernization, including encapsulation, interface stabilization, and technical debt reduction.
• Document and share architectural patterns and lessons learned across supply chain and legacy initiatives.
Vendor & Modernization Tooling
• Support evaluation and selection of modernization tools, platforms, and system integrators.
• Provide architectural oversight for vendor-led modernization efforts, ensuring alignment with long-term supply chain architecture goals.
• Contribute to build vs. buy vs. transform decisions for supply chain systems.


Required Qualifications
• 15+ years of experience in solutions or enterprise architecture within operationally critical, legacy-heavy environments.
• Demonstrated success working with and modernizing enterprise systems, preferably in supply chain contexts.
• Strong understanding of application architectures, batch processing models, and legacy data structures.
• Deep experience with integrat