Lansing, MI - IT - Agency Services - DHHS - Software Solutions Architect

Job Title: Software Solutions Architect

Job Summary:
This position functions as a Salesforce Application Architect within the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), supporting the modernization and ongoing operations of critical Child Welfare and State Hospital systems, including the Michigan Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System (MiSACWIS) and the Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System (CCWIS). These systems are essential to the delivery of services to vulnerable children and families across Michigan and require high availability, scalability, and compliance with state and federal standards.

The architect is responsible for leading the design, development, and implementation of enterprise-grade Salesforce solutions, ensuring architectural integrity, platform optimization, and alignment with MDHHS's strategic and operational goals. This includes transitioning legacy systems to a modern Salesforce-based platform, with a focus on Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Field Service Lightning (FSL).

Job Responsibilities:

• Leading end-to-end architecture and technical design of Salesforce solutions that support case management, field service operations, and user engagement.
• Conducting org health checks and platform assessments, and delivering actionable recommendations based on Salesforce best practices.
• Participating in Design & Discovery sessions and promoting the adoption of Salesforce's Well-Architected Framework.
• Providing technical leadership and mentorship to development teams, including state employees and contractors.
• Collaborating with business analysts, product owners, and stakeholders to translate complex business requirements into scalable, maintainable Salesforce solutions.
• Overseeing proof-of-concepts (POCs) to validate technical feasibility and business value of proposed solutions.
• Ensuring secure application development lifecycle (SADLC) practices are followed throughout all phases of development and deployment.
• Setting the technical direction for MDHHS Child Welfare applications.
• Supporting 24/7 operations of Tier 2 applications like MiSACWIS, which serve over 8,000 users across state and private agencies.
• Ensuring compliance with security, performance, and regulatory standards.

Primary Duties (80%): Serve as the development specialist responsible for the design, development, testing and documentation of the technical software solutions. Solve system design problems and programming issues. Ensure that the solutions are integrated and enhanced to meet the needs of the agency's business plan.

• Lead development of software applications, server components and services using various development tools and State of Michigan approved/supported technologies.
• Plan/Coordinate integration of systems within the business area, external partners, state agencies, and hosting platforms.
• Design and implement application security that complies with State of Michigan policies.
• Lead/Direct impact analysis of changes due to legislation, requests, or changes in governmental and business processes.
• Review/Approve presentation materials for technical review meetings, approval sessions, application demonstrations.
• Ensure that technical design strategies or applications adhere to State and agency policies, standards, and guidelines.
• Review and approve State of Michigan system engineering methodology or other required technical deliverables.

Primary Duties (15%): Provide technical leadership to the application development team, agency, and external groups

• Work with teams and product owners to refine SADLC, prioritize agile backlogs, and maintain release readiness/schedule.
• Ensure compliance with ECM standards and procedures across development, system test, user acceptance testing, security, and production environments, includes coordinating, creating, approving, and monitoring required work items.
• Make technical recommendation(s) and/or decision(s) for changes to the Bridges application based on user requirements.
• Solve complex system design and programming problems which ensure high security is addressed for client level of data.
• Plan for coordination, development, testing and integration of systems and data with Bridges.

Primary Duties (5%): Research and evaluate relevant technology as it pertains to the business strategy

• Maintain thorough, up to date knowledge of programming techniques used in software development in line with the DTMB technology standards
• Recommend configuration management tool best practices.
• Identify/Share/Recommend improvements to tools and technology to development team and technical support staff.

Required Skills:

5+ years of experience gathering and analyzing business and technical requirements in collaboration with stakeholders

Experience designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines, including pipeline-as-code, branching strategies, automated code reviews, and testing aligned with organizational goals

Strong ability to communicate technical concepts clearly and effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences

2-3 Salesforce certifications required (new requirement)

5+ years of hands-on experience with Salesforce, SQL, Java, and web services development

Most Preferred Skills:

Salesforce Architect certification (new requirement)

Experience working on enterprise-level implementations

Database-related certifications

Other Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience working within Agile development environments

• Strong experience with Oracle SQL development, including query execution and performance tuning
• Experience working with DevOps practices, including automated builds, testing (regression/smoke), and multi-environment deployments
• Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot complex system issues and provide technical guidance/leadership to development teams