Associate Director, Application & Product Architecture

Summary

The Associate Director, Application & Product Architect is a senior technical leader responsible for translating Business License product strategy into pragmatic, scalable architecture. The role combines long-range platform direction with hands-on partnerships across Product, Engineering, UX, Security, Data, and Infrastructure. This leader will guide the evolution from tightly coupled legacy applications toward modular business capabilities, modern APIs and services, cloud-based operations, intelligent and agentic product experiences while balancing near-term delivery with long-term sustainability.

About Business License

Business License helps organizations manage the complexity of business licensing and regulatory compliance across jurisdictions. Our solutions support license research, ordering, renewals, workflow, documentation, reporting, and ongoing compliance operations. Business License has impressive and consistent double-digit growth and an aggressive multi-year plan to continue to speed things up.

Business License is modernizing a mature product portfolio into a scalable, cloud-based ecosystem. Recent progress includes migration to Wolters Kluwer cloud infrastructure, conversion of a large Silverlight desktop application to Angular, improved release automation and resilience, and creation of the foundation for a License Intelligence Platform. The next phase focuses on platform simplification, service decoupling, enterprise performance, customer self-service, integrations, and AI-enabled workflows.

About the Role

This role offers the opportunity to shape a multi-year product and technology transformation that is already producing measurable delivery, performance, and user-experience gains. The architect will define the technical foundation for customer self-service, License Intelligence, workflow, reporting, integrations, and AI-enabled compliance experiences. The ideal candidate is a hands-on architect and trusted advisor who enjoys solving modernization and scale challenges, not only reviewing designs or governing standards.

Responsibilities

· Define and evolve the target application and product architecture for the Business License portfolio.

· Translate product strategy and complex licensing workflows into scalable capabilities, services, APIs, domain models, and integration patterns.

· Create architecture roadmaps that connect near-term product delivery with modernization, operational risk reduction, and customer outcomes.

· Guide incremental decomposition of legacy applications using pragmatic approaches such as domain-driven design, bounded contexts, and strangler-style modernization.

· Establish clear service ownership, contracts, and architectural guardrails while reducing coupling across presentation, business logic, data, and integration layers.

· Shape the consolidation of customer experiences and retirement of obsolete components without disrupting existing customers.

· Architect for large enterprise workloads, including database efficiency, service performance, workload isolation, resilience, and horizontal scale.

· Establish measurable non-functional requirements and service-level objectives for availability, latency, throughput, recovery, and reliability.

· Advance observability, automated functional and performance testing, production diagnostics, security, and cloud cost awareness as architecture capabilities.

· Define reusable and governable patterns for generative AI, retrieval, intelligent agents, regulatory content, customer context, and human-in-the-loop workflows.

· Determine where AI creates differentiated customer value and where deterministic application design remains more reliable or maintainable.

· Lead architecture reviews, provide implementation guidance, resolve complex technical challenges, and communicate trade-offs to engineering and executive stakeholders.

· Mentor technical leads and senior engineers and strengthen architecture practices without creating a governance bottleneck.

Skills and Experience

· Extensive experience designing and evolving complex enterprise applications, SaaS, or product architectures.

· Deep knowledge of distributed systems, modern web applications, APIs, service-oriented or microservice patterns, integration architecture, and cloud platforms.

· Demonstrated success modernizing large legacy applications while maintaining active customer delivery.

· Strong understanding of domain-driven design, service decomposition, data modeling, relational databases, performance engineering, resilience, observability, and secure architecture.

· Practical knowledge of generative AI patterns such as retrieval-augmented generation, tool-enabled agents, evaluation, grounding, and human oversight.

· Ability to independently lead complex architecture initiatives spanning multiple teams and influence decisions without relying on formal authority.

· Excellent written, visual, and verbal communication skills, including the ability to make complex architecture understandable to business and executive stakeholders.

· Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers, technical leads, or architects.

· New customer capabilities can be delivered without coordinated changes across a monolithic platform.

· Services have clear boundaries, ownership, contracts, performance expectations, and production telemetry.

· Large customers can scale confidently, with performance and reliability engineered and measured before release.

· Legacy components are progressively retired while APIs, integrations, and intelligent capabilities become reusable platform assets.

· Architecture improves delivery speed, system simplicity, safe change, and customer outcomes.

AI & Intelligent Product Architecture

• Help define how generative AI, intelligent agents, retrieval, regulatory content, customer data, and human expertise can safely work together within Business License workflows.
• Design architectural patterns for AI-enabled capabilities that are observable, testable, governable, and appropriate for regulated and compliance-oriented domains.
• Partner with product and engineering teams to identify where AI creates meaningful customer value versus where deterministic software remains the better solution.
• Help establish reusable AI services and platform capabilities rather than creating isolated point solutions.
• Promote engineering approaches that use AI to accelerate software delivery while retaining strong technical specifications, automated validation, security, and human oversight.

Our Interview Practices

To maintain a fair and genuine hiring process, we kindly ask that all candidates participate in interviews without the assistance of AI tools or external prompts. Our interview process is designed to assess your individual skills, experiences, and communication style. We value authenticity and want to ensure we’re getting to know you-not a digital assistant. To help maintain this integrity, we ask to remove virtual backgrounds and include in-person interviews in our hiring process. Please note that use of AI-generated responses or third-party support during interviews will be grounds for disqualification from the recruitment process.

Applicants may be required to appear onsite at a Wolters Kluwer office as part of the recruitment process.

Compensation:

Compensation range listed is based on primary location of the position. Actual base salary offer is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skills, experience and actual hiring location. Your recruiter can share more information about the specific offer for the job location during the hiring process.

Additional Information:

Wolters Kluwer offers a wide variety of competitive benefits and programs to help meet your needs and balance your work and personal life, including but not limited to: Medical, Dental, & Vision Plans, 401(k), FSA/HSA, Commuter Benefits, Tuition Assistance Plan, Vacation and Sick Time, and Paid Parental Leave. Full details of our benefits are available upon request.