Lead Solution Architect

Solution Architect – Digital Solutions

Location: Naperville, Illinois, USA

Position Summary:

Ecolab Digital develops connected, data-driven and AI-enabled solutions that help customers improve service outcomes, operational performance and decision-making. The Lead Solution Architect – Digital Solutions partners with Business and Product leaders, Digital Engineering, Data & AI, shared digital-platform teams, cybersecurity and enterprise technology partners to design secure, scalable and supportable solutions across the digital portfolio.

Operating within the portfolio architecture direction established by the Senior Director, Solution Architecture, this role independently leads solution architecture from business and product intent through engineering-ready design and implementation guidance. The architect serves as a day-to-day technical partner to Product and Engineering, makes well-bounded architecture decisions, and escalates enterprise-wide trade-offs and exceptions through established architecture leadership. The successful candidate brings strong distributed-systems and integration architecture, practical AI-enabled product experience, and sound judgment across cloud, connected systems, performance, security and production operability.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own end-to-end solution architecture for digital products and operational capabilities, translating customer, business and Product outcomes into coherent, engineering-ready technical designs and decisions.
• Architect solutions spanning web/mobile applications, cloud services, APIs, event-driven integration, data platforms, AI-enabled capabilities and operational workflows.
• Design production integration of AI/ML, generative AI and intelligent-agent capabilities, including trusted knowledge retrieval, enterprise data access, tool/API integration, evaluation, human oversight and operational controls.
• Architect modernization of enterprise operational and service capabilities, including CRM/service platforms, legacy systems and phased coexistence, with explicit capability boundaries, system-of-record ownership and transition states.
• Define clean integration boundaries between domain capabilities and shared Ecolab Digital and Enterprise platforms, including API/service contracts, events, data ownership, customer/site context, identity, authorization and entitlements.
• Work continuously with Product owners, engineering leaders and technical teams to turn solution intent into component designs, interface contracts, architecture decision records, non-functional requirements, delivery guardrails and implementable technical choices.
• Address performance and scalability for enterprise and multi-site use cases, including service fan-out, caching, asynchronous processing, data-access patterns, observability and capacity considerations.
• Architect connected-device and IoT integration where relevant, including ingestion, contextualization, event processing, edge/cloud boundaries and governed downstream consumption, with clear operational and analytical ownership.
• Apply security-by-design principles across identity, authentication/authorization, secrets, network boundaries, data access, tenant isolation and sensitive information handling.
• Work with shared platform, enterprise architecture, Data & AI, cybersecurity and infrastructure teams to use established enterprise patterns where they fit and surface genuine gaps where new capabilities are required.
• Provide architecture leadership through design, build, testing, deployment and operational readiness; resolve design trade-offs quickly without assuming project-management or line-management accountability.
• Contribute reusable architecture patterns, reference designs and lessons learned back into the broader Ecolab Digital architecture ecosystem.
• Communicate architecture decisions clearly to senior leaders, Product partners, engineers and globally distributed teams.
• Facilitate timely architecture decisions with Product and Engineering partners; document trade-offs, identify unresolved dependencies and engage enterprise architecture or platform owners when decisions cross domain boundaries.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering or a related technical field.
• 12+ years of progressive technology experience, including significant experience designing and delivering complex enterprise or digital solutions
• Strong hands-on architecture experience with cloud-native applications, APIs/microservices, event-driven integration, distributed systems and modern application design patterns.
• Experience translating business and Product requirements into end-to-end solution architectures, non-functional requirements and engineering-ready technical direction.
• Experience architecting complex enterprise integrations or operational/service platform transformations, including legacy-system integration, clear data ownership and phased migration/coexistence patterns.
• Strong understanding of performance, scalability, availability, resilience, maintainability, observability and production-support considerations.
• Knowledge of identity, authentication/authorization, data-access controls, secure integration patterns and tenant-aware application design.
• Ability to reason across application, integration, data, platform and infrastructure boundaries rather than optimizing a single technology layer.
• Ability to work effectively with Product, Engineering, Data & AI, cybersecurity, infrastructure and enterprise-platform stakeholders.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain architecture trade-offs and decisions to senior technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience working with globally distributed teams and guiding engineers/technical leads through ambiguity without relying on positional authority.
• Demonstrated ability to lead architecture working sessions, review engineering designs, mentor technical contributors and drive pragmatic decisions across multiple concurrent initiatives.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with B2B digital products supporting distributed operations, service workflows, customer/site hierarchies or similarly complex enterprise environments.
• 5 years in solution or technical architecture roles.
• Experience integrating AI/ML or generative-AI capabilities into production applications, with sound understanding of security, data boundaries, evaluation/quality, observability and human accountability.
• Experience with IoT/connected-device ecosystems, telemetry, event processing or edge-to-cloud integration.
• Experience with Azure or another major cloud platform and modern data/analytics platforms such as Databricks or equivalent.
• Experience with enterprise API management, event streaming, observability/APM and distributed tracing.
• Experience with generative-AI or agentic solution patterns, retrieval/knowledge integration, enterprise authorization, content lifecycle and secure tool/API orchestration in production environments.
• Experience modernizing legacy integrations and introducing stable service/event boundaries while supporting phased coexistence and migration.
• Experience creating reusable reference architectures, architecture decision records and standards that accelerate delivery without creating unnecessary governance overhead.
  

Benefits 

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Potential Customer Requirements Notice

To meet customer requirements and comply with local or state regulations, applicants for certain customer-facing roles may need to:

- Undergo additional background screens and/or drug/alcohol testing for customer credentialing.

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