Associate Director, Application & Product Architecture

Wolters Kluwer•Coppell, TX

About The Position

The Associate Director, Application & Product Architect is a senior technical leader responsible for translating Business License product strategy into pragmatic, scalable architecture. The role combines long-range platform direction with hands-on partnerships across Product, Engineering, UX, Security, Data, and Infrastructure. The leader will guide the evolution from tightly coupled legacy applications toward modular business capabilities, modern APIs and services, cloud-based operations, and intelligent and agentic product experiences while balancing near-term delivery with long-term sustainability. Business License helps organizations manage business licensing and regulatory compliance across jurisdictions. Its solutions support license research, ordering, renewals, workflow, documentation, reporting, and ongoing compliance operations. The portfolio is being modernized into a scalable, cloud-based ecosystem. The next phase focuses on platform simplification, service decoupling, enterprise performance, customer self-service, integrations, and AI-enabled workflows. The architect will define the technical foundation for customer self-service, License Intelligence, workflow, reporting, integrations, and AI-enabled compliance experiences. This is a hands-on architecture role focused on modernization and scale challenges, working with product and engineering teams to deliver measurable improvements in delivery, performance, and user experience.

Requirements

Extensive experience designing and evolving complex enterprise applications, SaaS, or product architectures.
Deep knowledge of distributed systems, modern web applications, APIs, service-oriented or microservice patterns, integration architecture, and cloud platforms.
Demonstrated success modernizing large legacy applications while maintaining active customer delivery.
Strong understanding of domain-driven design, service decomposition, data modeling, relational databases, performance engineering, resilience, observability, and secure architecture.
Practical knowledge of generative AI patterns such as retrieval-augmented generation, tool-enabled agents, evaluation, grounding, and human oversight.
Ability to independently lead complex architecture initiatives spanning multiple teams and influence decisions without relying on formal authority.
Excellent written, visual, and verbal communication skills, including the ability to make complex architecture understandable to business and executive stakeholders.
Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers, technical leads, or architects.

Responsibilities

Define and evolve the target application and product architecture for the Business License portfolio.
Translate product strategy and complex licensing workflows into scalable capabilities, services, APIs, domain models, and integration patterns.
Create architecture roadmaps that connect near-term product delivery with modernization, operational risk reduction, and customer outcomes.
Guide incremental decomposition of legacy applications using pragmatic approaches such as domain-driven design, bounded contexts, and strangler-style modernization.
Establish clear service ownership, contracts, and architectural guardrails while reducing coupling across presentation, business logic, data, and integration layers.
Shape the consolidation of customer experiences and retirement of obsolete components without disrupting existing customers.
Architect for large enterprise workloads, including database efficiency, service performance, workload isolation, resilience, and horizontal scale.
Establish measurable non-functional requirements and service-level objectives for availability, latency, throughput, recovery, and reliability.
Advance observability, automated functional and performance testing, production diagnostics, security, and cloud cost awareness as architecture capabilities.
Define reusable and governable patterns for generative AI, retrieval, intelligent agents, regulatory content, customer context, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
Determine where AI creates differentiated customer value and where deterministic application design is more reliable or maintainable.
Lead architecture reviews, provide implementation guidance, resolve complex technical challenges, and communicate trade-offs to engineering and executive stakeholders.
Mentor technical leads and senior engineers and strengthen architecture practices without creating a governance bottleneck.
Partner with product and engineering teams to identify valuable AI use cases and establish reusable AI services and platform capabilities.
Promote AI-accelerated software delivery while retaining strong technical specifications, automated validation, security, and human oversight.