Sr Enterprise Architect

Border States • Fargo, ND

3d • $169,000 - $230,000 • Remote

About The Position

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.

Requirements

• 4 Year STEM Degree or equivalent work experience required.
• 12+ years of progressive experience across enterprise architecture, solution architecture, or platform architecture, including significant cross-domain responsibility.
• Demonstrated experience shaping enterprise architecture decisions across ERP, integration, applications, and data.
• Proven success guiding ERP modernization or large enterprise platform transformation in a complex operating environment.
• Strong experience with modern integration patterns, including APIs, event-driven architecture, service reuse, observability, and lifecycle management.
• Strong fluency in data architecture, master data governance concepts, and analytics enablement.
• Demonstrated ability to define architecture standards and decision processes that accelerate delivery rather than slow it down.
• Strong business acumen and the ability to connect architecture decisions to operating model, risk, cost, and growth outcomes.
• Experience in wholesale distribution, industrial distribution, manufacturing distribution, or another branch-heavy, inventory-intensive, multi-site business.
• Experience with SAP S/4HANA environments and clean-core governance.
• Experience working in a federated architecture model with domain architects or embedded architecture leadership.
• Experience with post-merger integration patterns, portfolio rationalization, or enterprise platform simplification.
• Familiarity with formal architecture frameworks and structured architecture description methods; practical outcomes matter more than certification alone.
• Executive-level communication skills and proven influence without relying solely on hierarchy.
• Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to build trusted relationships across technical and business teams.
• Excellent customer service skills include being courteous, responsive, accurate and competent and engaged.
• Strong planning, organization, and prioritization skills.
• Ability to communicate effectively with technical and non-technical audiences across a variety of settings.
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively to achieve shared goals.
• Ability to gain consensus, make decisions, and take ownership of outcomes.
• Strong analytical skills and the ability to quickly understand the drivers of a business process.
• Demonstrated leadership ability and strong teamwork orientation.
• Ability to work seamlessly across geographical, functional, and cultural boundaries.
• Self-starter with a proactive, solutions-oriented mindset. Ability to develop and maintain effective working relationships with customers, vendors, and other partners while representing the company’s reputation.
• Enterprise thinking across business capabilities, processes, applications, data, and platforms.
• Ability to simplify complexity and frame tradeoffs clearly for executives.
• Comfort setting guardrails without introducing unnecessary bureaucracy.
• Strong judgment in balancing speed, standardization, and long-term scalability.
• Credibility with domain leaders, architects, engineering teams, and business stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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 other duties as assigned by supervisor or designate.

Benefits

• Health, Dental and Vision Benefits
• Accident, Critical Illness, Hospital Indemnity
• FSA & HSA
• Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP)
• Disability Benefits
• 401(k) Retirement Plan
• Life Insurance
• Employee Assistance Program
• Paid Holidays
• Paid Volunteer Time
• Personal Leave time
• bonuses to their employee-owners upon the achievement of branch and company goals

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees