Solutions Architect

Summit School Services companies share a strong commitment to provide the highest level of transportation safety, quality transportation, outstanding customer service and positive employee relations. Our corporate headquarters, located in Warrenville, Illinois, houses the administrative and corporate support functions for the organization. Our 250+ local customer service centers (CSCs) are supported by regional operations teams located throughout North America.

Summit LLC is looking for a Solution Architect, Application Developer who is equally comfortable designing enterprise-grade solutions on a whiteboard and building them in an IDE. This is not a pure-architecture, PowerPoint-and-diagrams role: we need a technologist who has walked the path from hands-on developer to architect, still writes production code, and can translate business and technical strategy — including our growing AI initiatives — into systems that actually ship.

You will own solution architecture across one or more critical application domains, partner with engineering leadership to define our AI roadmap, and personally build proofs of concept, prototypes, and production components alongside the development teams you guide. We're looking for someone who leads by building, not just by directing.

Solution Architecture & Technical Leadership

- Design end-to-end solution architectures for complex, business-critical applications, balancing scalability, security, performance, maintainability, and cost.
- Own architectural decision records (ADRs), design reviews, and technical standards across the application portfolio.
- Translate business requirements and enterprise architecture principles into concrete technical designs, integration patterns, and data flows.
- Partner with product, engineering, and executive stakeholders to align technology decisions with business strategy.
- Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions, new frameworks, platforms, and vendor tools; make recommendations backed by hands-on proof of concept work rather than theory alone.

Hands-On Development & Engineering

- Actively write, review, and ship production code — this role is expected to spend meaningful time in the codebase, not just in design documents.
- Build reference implementations, spikes, and prototypes to validate architectural decisions before broader teams commit to them.
- Lead by example on engineering best practices: clean code, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, and secure coding standards.
- Provide deep technical mentorship to application developers and engineers, including pairing, code review, and design walkthroughs.
- Troubleshoot and resolve complex, cross-cutting technical issues that span multiple systems, services, or teams.

AI Roadmapping & Applied AI

- Co-own Summit LLC's AI technology roadmap: assess emerging AI/ML capabilities, define adoption sequencing, and identify where AI creates real business value versus hype.
- Bring hands-on experience integrating AI/ML capabilities into production applications — for example LLM-powered features, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), AI coding/developer-productivity tooling, intelligent automation, or predictive/ML models — rather than purely conceptual AI knowledge.
- Prototype and pilot AI-enabled features and internal tools, evaluating models, providers, and architectures (including cost, latency, data governance, and security trade-offs).
- Advise engineering and product leadership on responsible, practical AI adoption, including data readiness, model evaluation, and guardrails.
- Stay current on the fast-moving AI/ML landscape and translate relevant advances into actionable recommendations for Summit LLC's application portfolio.

Vendor & Application Ownership

- Serve as the technical owner for key third-party/vendor applications within your domain — accountable for how they're architected, integrated, configured, and extended within our environment.
- Lead technical vendor reviews and evaluations (RFPs, proofs of concept, upgrade assessments), assessing architectural fit, security, scalability, and total cost of ownership.
- Partner with vendors on their product roadmaps, providing technical input, surfacing risks/gaps, and aligning vendor direction with Summit LLC's internal architecture and AI roadmaps.
- Own the technical roadmap for owned applications — planning upgrades, deprecations, integrations, and modernization efforts, and communicating them to stakeholders.
- Manage the technical side of vendor relationships in partnership with procurement/vendor management, including renewal evaluations, support escalations, and contract-relevant technical requirements.

Collaboration & Governance

- Work cross-functionally with product management, data, security, infrastructure, and QA teams to ensure solutions are secure, compliant, and operationally sound.
- Contribute to and help evolve architecture governance, technical roadmaps, and engineering standards organization-wide.
- Communicate technical concepts and trade-offs clearly to both technical teams and non-technical stakeholders/executives.

$170,000 - $190,000

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

- 10-15+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, with meaningful time spent as a hands-on developer before and during time in an architecture role.
- Proven prior experience specifically as a Solution/Application/Enterprise Architect — including ownership of architectural decisions for production systems.
- Demonstrated, continued hands-on engineering ability: comfortable writing production-quality code, not only reviewing or diagramming it.
- Hands-on experience applying AI/ML technologies in real projects (e.g., building or integrating LLM-based features, AI copilots, RAG pipelines, ML models, or intelligent automation).
- Experience building and communicating a technology or AI roadmap to engineering leadership and/or executive stakeholders.
- Strong grounding in software architecture patterns (microservices, event-driven architecture, domain-driven design, API design) and cloud-native application design.
- Solid experience with modern application development across at least one of: enterprise stacks (e.g., .NET, Java) on Azure or AWS; full-stack web development (JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Node.js) on cloud-native infrastructure; or data/AI platform engineering.
- Excellent communication skills, with a track record of influencing technical direction without relying solely on positional authority.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

- Experience owning third-party/vendor applications end-to-end, including leading technical vendor reviews, RFPs, and influencing vendor product roadmaps.
- Experience spanning multiple technical domains — e.g., enterprise backend systems, modern full-stack web applications, and data/AI platforms — rather than a single narrow specialty.
- Familiarity with AI/ML tooling such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Azure/AWS AI services, vector databases, orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex), or MLOps platforms.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and cloud-native deployment pipelines.
- Prior experience in a consulting, professional services, or client-facing technical role.

Summit School Services has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with its policies and values, including sexual exploitation and abuse, harassment, abuse of authority, and discrimination. Summit School Services is committed to promoting the protection and safeguarding of all children and passengers.

We offer medical, dental, vision, basic life insurance coverage, holiday pay, and PTO accrual. Additionally, employees are able to enroll in a retirement savings plan.

At Summit School Services our goal is to be a diverse workforce that is representative of the communities we serve. All employment decisions are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy (including childbirth, lactation and related medical conditions), national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information (including characteristics and testing), military and veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Summit School Services LLC’s independent subsidiaries and affiliates are an equal employment opportunity ( EE O) employer

The pay rate range, along with most all of the other terms and conditions of employment, vary between different sites, geographical markets, customer/ contractual terms and positions.