{"id":187480,"url":"https://alion.io/job/appnovation-solutions-architect-2","title":"Solutions Architect","company":{"id":58181,"name":"Appnovation","domain":"appnovation.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/appnovation","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"services","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":88,"open_postings":4,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.5,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":29,"computed_at":"2026-11-11T05:49:22Z"}},"role":"Solutions","role_family":"Solutions","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Toronto, Canada"],"countries":["CA"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":75000,"max_usd":158000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":53},"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Databricks","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"Snowflake","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Iceberg","optional":true},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"Collibra","optional":true},{"name":"FinOps","optional":true},{"name":"GDPR","optional":true},{"name":"HIPAA","optional":true},{"name":"Knowledge Graph","optional":true},{"name":"Neo4j","optional":true},{"name":"Python","optional":true},{"name":"RAG","optional":true},{"name":"Terraform","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-01T20:20:35Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-11","last_verified_at":"2026-11-11T20:36:49Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":71,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":1,"flags":[],"days_open":71},"description":"About us\nAppnovation is the AI Product Company. Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, with teams around the world, Appnovation builds AI products, delivers enterprise AI and digital solutions, and co-invests with clients to bring new AI products to market.\nOpen source has been the foundation of Appnovation's work since 2007, and it remains the foundation underneath every AI product the company builds today. Appnovation teams work with organizations in highly regulated industries, including global leaders such as Pfizer, Google and AstraZeneca, to help them adopt AI they can govern and own.\nTechnology is foundational to all of Appnovation’s offerings, from consulting to digital innovation to digital product and service creation. The technology department is focused on delivering software solutions that enable rich consumer experiences, from mobile and web applications to advanced analytics and machine learning, to content and engagement management service enablement platforms.\nInherent throughout our tech capabilities is deep expertise in the Software Development Life Cycle, a drive for creativity, a passion for the craft, and collaboration with other disciplines - all foundational ingredients in successful digital experiences and client partnerships.\nWe are seeking a Principal Solutions Architect to define the architecture for a governed, zero-copy, cross-cloud data platform, establishing the design standards and integration priorities that guide the engineering team. Working across Databricks, Snowflake, and adjacent cloud data sources, this leader will translate an evolving product vision into concrete design specifications and a clear path toward agent-based data consumption, while ensuring alignment with the organization’s existing enterprise engineering practices. The role is accountable for owning the end-to-end solution architecture of a governed, zero-copy data platform in which data remains in place within its source systems. This position requires a senior, hands-on technical leader who can operate at the intersection of platform strategy, modern data engineering, and architectural governance - creating clarity from complexity, making sound build-versus-integrate trade-offs, and setting the technical standards that help Appnovation’s clients deliver faster, safer, and more reusable data capabilities.\nROLE RESPONSIBILITIES\nSolution Architecture Ownership: Own the end-to-end solution architecture for a governed, zero-copy data platform in which data remains in place within its source systems, working across Databricks, Snowflake, and adjacent cloud data sources.\nArchitecture Artifacts and Standards: Produce architecture artifacts - decision records, reference architectures, and solution diagrams - establish the design standards that guide the engineering team, and provide clear build-versus-integrate recommendations.\nCatalog and Metadata Integration: Define and prioritize catalog and metadata integration patterns across cloud and lakehouse environments.\nAgent-Based Access Design: Design agent- and MCP-based access patterns that expose governed data products to enterprise AI tools and agent platforms.\nFuture-State Direction: Establish future-state direction for data products, cross-source data composition, and agentic consumption, translating an evolving product vision into concrete design specifications.\n Enterprise Alignment: Ensure alignment with the organization’s existing enterprise engineering practices while guiding the engineering team toward a clear path for agent-based data consumption.\nQUALIFICATIONS\nBachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, with 10+ years of technology experience, including significant experience in solution, enterprise, or data architecture.\nSenior solutions or enterprise architect with demonstrated experience designing cross-cloud and multi-cloud data architectures.\nProven application of zero-copy, data-mesh, and data-product principles, including domain-driven design.\nDeep expertise in data governance, including attribute- and role-based access control, data sensitivity and policy classification, and geolocation-based access requirements.\nExperience defining data-contract standards (e.g., the Linux Foundation / Open Data Contract Standard) and embedding governance metadata into platform workflows.\nStrong background in identity and access management for both users and machine/agent identities (OAuth/OIDC, service accounts).\nExcellent communication, stakeholder-management, and documentation skills, with the ability to explain complex technical trade-offs to both technical and non-technical audiences.\nPrior experience in a consulting or client-facing delivery environment, working across multiple concurrent initiatives and priorities.\nPREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS\nFamiliarity with semantic layers, ontologies, knowledge graphs, and retrieval-augmented generation or vector search for data discovery.\nAwareness of cross-cloud cost management and FinOps practices.\nExperience operating in a regulated life-sciences or comparable compliance-driven environment (GxP, GDPR/HIPAA, PII/PHI handling).\nTECHNICAL EXPERIENCE\nData platforms: Databricks, Snowflake; AWS-native data a plus.\nGovernance and catalog: Collibra, Unity Catalog, Horizon; Neo4j and knowledge graphs.\nAI and agents: MCP, Snowflake Cortex and Genie, vector search and embeddings.\nFormats and contracts: Apache Iceberg and open table formats, YAML-based data contracts.\n Foundations: Python; OAuth/OIDC and identity providers; infrastructure-as-code (Terraform).\nLEADERSHIP CAPABILITIES\nArchitectural Strategy and Judgment: Connects business priorities, enterprise architecture standards, and emerging technology into a practical target architecture that guides design and investment.\nInfluence and Partnership: Communicates clearly with engineering teams and senior stakeholders, frames build-versus-integrate trade-offs, builds alignment, and drives decisions without relying solely on formal authority.\nTechnical Depth and Breadth: Brings hands-on credibility across cloud data platforms, governance, and agent-based access to guide engineers, challenge assumptions, evaluate emerging technologies, and make sound platform-scale technology choices.\nGovernance Mindset: Embeds data governance, access control, and data-contract standards into platform workflows, balancing the openness of governed data products with security, privacy, and compliance.\n AI and Modern Delivery Mindset: Understands how agentic consumption, MCP-based access, and modern data-product thinking can responsibly expose governed data to enterprise AI while maintaining appropriate controls and verification.\nWHO YOU ARE\nYou have a customer-first mindset and a devotion to customer service\nYou can influence technology choices with both engineers and senior leaders\nYou engage and build positive internal and external client relationships, while managing multiple initiatives, often with competing priorities\nYou have strong self-initiative, passion, interpersonal, oral and written communication and collaboration skills with the ability to work, influence and make an impact in a cross-functional environment with all levels of the organization\nYou can take an evolving product vision and business requirements and transform them into concrete technical designs and specifications for software developers, data engineers, and other technology stakeholders\nYou can explain complex technical solutions engagingly to technical and non-technical audiences and connect technological solutions with measurable business value.\nYou have solid analytical, problem-solving and decision-making skills\nYou set high standards for architecture quality, governance, performance/scalability and security and seek continuous improvement\nYou are responsive and thrive in a fast-paced diverse high-performance environment with rapidly changing business needs\nYou actively seek out things outside your comfort zone with the ability to rapidly learn and take advantage of new concepts, business models, and technologies\nYou are comfortable in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial and rapid-growth environment\nYou have prior experience in consulting and client negotiations\nPrior experience and connections in the Life Sciences industry is preferred\nThank you for your interest in a career with Appnovation Technologies! Please note that only those selected for an interview will be contacted.\nAt Appnovation, we recognize that diverse teams are the strongest teams. Diversity, Equity & Inclusion is not only something that we embrace - we celebrate it! We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and we encourage applicants from all backgrounds, lived experiences and industries to apply. Come join us at Appnovation, and learn more about how we stay true to our company values as we build better lives through better digital. \n\nAccommodations are available upon request throughout the recruitment process.","description_format":"text","description_chars":8992,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Web Design","Web Development Services","Custom Software Development"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-01T22:17:11Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-10-21T16:58:59Z"},{"event":"reopen","at":"2026-11-11T14:47:50Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":18,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.654,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":71,"expected_fill_days":29,"reasons":["conf:2","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-11-11T22:43:48Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/appnovation-solutions-architect-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/appnovation-solutions-architect-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-11T22:43:48Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":45074,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-12T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":58181},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=58181"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fappnovation-solutions-architect-2"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fappnovation-solutions-architect-2"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fappnovation-solutions-architect-2"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/appnovation-solutions-architect-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fappnovation-solutions-architect-2"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":187480}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"appnovation.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":187480},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}