Sr Enterprise Architect

Be part of a growing, successful company in an exciting and challenging field. Border States is 100% employee-owned, which means you’re empowered to make decisions, find solutions and receive rewards for your hard work.
 
This position will be located in: Fargo, ND or remotely any state in the US. 

Application Deadline: Posted Until Filled

Please note that the position may be filled before or after the listed application deadline. Applications will only be accepted while the posting remains active.

Job Summary

The Senior Enterprise Architect is the senior cross-domain architect for Border States. This leader shapes enterprise architecture strategy, governs major standards, and ensures that technology investments align to a durable enterprise target state. The role oversees architecture for ERP modernization and clean core guardrails, enterprise integration and event/API patterns, master data and analytics consistency, cross platform roadmap coherence, and technology portfolio rationalization. The Enterprise Architect is accountable for enterprise coherence and enables execution through practical guardrails, clear decision processes, and strong partnership with business and technology leaders. The role engages directly with initiatives and delivery teams, emphasizing enablement over gatekeeping by making sound architectural decisions easier through practical patterns, early engagement, and coaching rather than late stage review or centralized approval.

Responsibilities

Essential Functions

• Partners with business and technology leaders to define enterprise architecture direction and ensure major initiatives reinforce business process performance, platform coherence, and long term scalability.
• Defines and operates enterprise architecture standards, guardrails, and exception processes in coordination with the VP of Digital Transformation, CIO, Security, and domain leaders.
• Provides thought leadership in modern architecture principles, technology modernization, and enterprise wide architectural coherence.
• Evaluates SaaS platforms, vendors, and major solution designs for capability fit, integration complexity, identity and data implications, scalability, total cost of ownership, and long term portfolio alignment.
• Develops and maintains architecture artifacts—including logical, business, integration, and functional diagrams—to support engineering, applications, and security teams.
• Defines enterprise transition roadmaps for ERP, integration, data, analytics, and adjacent platforms, emphasizing clean core principles, technical debt reduction, and delivery sequencing.
• Leads architecture reviews and recommendations for major initiatives, platform changes, new technologies, and cross domain designs, ensuring alignment with approved guardrails.
• Advises senior leaders on tradeoffs involving reuse, scalability, complexity, risk, technical debt, and long term enterprise fit.
• Translates current state capabilities into future state architecture and roadmap decisions in partnership with business, process, and domain leaders.
• Establishes and governs ERP architecture guardrails for SAP modernization, including clean core principles, extensibility boundaries, and integration constraints.
• Defines and governs enterprise integration standards, including API first patterns, event driven architecture, canonical data principles, observability, resilience, and lifecycle management.
• Defines enterprise standards for master data ownership, stewardship models, domain boundaries, and governance mechanisms, and supports trustworthy analytics, certified KPIs, and semantic consistency.
• Operates a fast, documented architecture decision and exception process and ensures governance remains lightweight, pragmatic, and delivery focused.
• Defines architecture criteria for application portfolio rationalization, integration simplification, and technical debt visibility, and influences build/buy/reuse decisions through a business capability and enterprise value lens.
• Leads a federated architecture operating model and Architecture CoE, raising architecture quality across domains through early engagement, coaching, and cross functional alignment.

Non-essential Functions

• Identifies and implements process improvement ideas to reduce the overall time and/or cost of operations.
• Provides leadership that inspires peer respect, team building, continuous learning, and self-improvement.
• Maintains business continuity and disaster recovery test documentation. 
• Participates, creates, contributes and/or facilitates ongoing training for application functionality / best practice / lunch and learn topics related training.
• Performs ot