I&T Systems Architect

Department: Innovation and Technology Department

Salary: $108,851.00 - $156,473.59 Commensurate with Experience

Welcome to the City of Charlotte

Charlotte is America’s Queen City, opening her arms to a diverse and inclusive community of residents, businesses and visitors alike. Here you will find a safe, family-oriented city where people work together to help everyone thrive. The mission of the City of Charlotte is to deliver quality public services and promote the safety, health, and quality of life for all residents.

Our guiding principles include:

Attracting and retaining a skilled and diverse workforce

Valuing teamwork, openness, accountability, productivity, and employee development

Providing all customers with courteous, responsive, accessible, and seamless quality services

Taking initiative to identify, analyze, and solve problems

Collaborating with stakeholders to make informed decisions

SUMMARY

The purpose of this position is to define, maintain, and govern the City’s enterprise technology architecture by developing strategic technology plans, standards, roadmaps, and solution designs that guide how systems are selected, implemented, integrated, and supported. The role ensures that technology decisions are consistent, well‑designed, and aligned with business needs, long‑term strategies, and regulatory and cybersecurity requirements.

This position serves as a central liaison across customer department stakeholders, technology teams, vendors, project managers, and leadership. It interprets business goals, functional needs, and operational constraints, and translates them into clear architectural direction, requirements, and solution approaches. The role helps shape technology investments through standards development, proposal creation, procurement support, and architectural review.

In addition, the position provides leadership throughout the full solution lifecycle—guiding discovery, evaluating alternatives, developing architectural artifacts, and advising on design, implementation, and governance activities. By connecting strategy, standards, and solution delivery, the role ensures that the City’s technology environment remains secure, scalable, cost‑effective, and able to support evolving city priorities.

Major Duties and Responsibilities:

Standards and Model Development

Develop and maintain enterprise technology standards, architectural principles, reference architectures, and design patterns across applications, infrastructure, cloud, data, integration, security, and operations.

Establish architectural guidelines for scalability, availability, performance, interoperability, security, privacy, accessibility, and cost effectiveness, ensuring alignment with business and technical needs.

Collaborate with technology and business partners to apply industry best practices and assess the organizational, financial, operational, and security impacts of proposed standards.

Maintain architecture repositories, capability models, documentation, and technology inventories; support architecture governance and review technologies for compliance with enterprise direction.

Proposal Creation

Develop clear, executive‑ready technology proposals and business cases that incorporate cost and TCO analysis, staffing impacts, timelines, risks, mitigation strategies, and cost–benefit evaluations.

Address enterprise considerations such as security, privacy, compliance, accessibility, integration, data, infrastructure, and business continuity in proposed solutions.

Evaluate vendor offerings, contractual requirements, technical alternatives, and solution risks; articulate dependencies, assumptions, constraints, and decision rationale.

Produce conceptual, logical, and physical architecture diagrams to support proposals, communicating recommendations, tradeoffs, and risks to technical and nontechnical audiences.

Recommend solutions that are secure, scalable, maintainable, cost‑effective, and aligned with enterprise architecture standards and business priorities.

Proposal Solicitation & Review

Shape technology investments by contributing to solicitation language, requirements, and procurement documentation (RFI/RFP/etc.).

Define or refine technical, functional, and nonfunctional requirements, along with architecture diagrams, integration needs, security/privacy standards, data and accessibility requirements, SLAs, and implementation/support expectations.

Review vendor proposals, statements of work, architectures, and technical designs to ensure alignment with enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, infrastructure, data, procurement, and operational standards.

Evaluate vendor solutions, implementation approaches, licensing models, support structures, technical risks, and potential lock‑in; participate in demos, technical evaluations, negotiations, and proof‑of‑concepts.

Identify gaps, unsupported assumptions, hidden costs, dependencies, and implementation risks; contribute to contract language, SOWs, acceptance criteria, and architecture deliverables for selected solutions.

Solution Architecture

Develop end‑to‑end solution architectures by translating business requirements, constraints, and desired outcomes into secure, scalable, reliable, and cost‑effective designs.

Lead discovery, requirements workshops, and architecture/design reviews to analyze current and future functional, technical, security, data, integration, and infrastructure needs.

Produce key architectural artifacts, including context, system, integration, and data‑flow diagrams; deployment models; interface specifications; and definitions of system components, dependencies, environments, and nonfunctional requirements.

Design and evaluate application, infrastructure, cloud, integration, data, identity, and security architectures across on‑prem, cloud, hybrid, and multi‑cloud environments.

Architect secure and scalable AWS solutions using cloud best practices and the AWS Well‑Architected Framework, supporting landing zones, modernization efforts, IaC approaches, migration strategies, and the City’s cloud governance.

Research technologies and vendor offerings, assess alternatives and risks, and communicate solution options, tradeoffs, and recommendations to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.

Provide architectural guidance throughout planning, design, development, testing, deployment, and operations; review deliverables for compliance with approved architectures and identify technical debt, risks, and improvement opportunities.

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

Broad understanding of enterprise‑level technology domains and how they fit together to support business strategy.

Strong collaboration, facilitation, communication, and stakeholder‑engagement skills.

Ability to quickly understand business functions, processes, and organizational context.

Ability to apply architectural best practices, frameworks, and standards to guide decision‑making.

Proven ability to lead discussions with senior leadership and communicate complex ideas clearly.

Strong analytical, writing, research, presentation, and influencing skills.

Ability to assess market trends, vendor capabilities, and technology options.

Skilled at evaluating complex problems and developing practical, sustainable solutions.

Ability to develop cost estimates, business cases, roadmaps, risk assessments, and implementation plans.

Ability to interpret and produce clear architectural documentation and models.

Strong change‑management, relationship‑building, and conflict‑resolution capabilities.

Knowledge of key IT governance areas such as cybersecurity, privacy, continuity planning, and risk management.

Familiarity with project lifecycles, IT service management, and technology governance processes.

Ability to manage competing priorities and deliver high‑quality work on time.

Minimum Qualifications:

High School Graduate or Equiv