About the Role:

The Salesforce Platform Architect is a trusted advisor, visionary, and technical leader responsible for defining, guiding, and executing Baird’s Salesforce platform and integration strategy. This role blends deep technical expertise with business acumen to influence at the enterprise level, ensuring Salesforce solutions are scalable, secure, compliant, and aligned with business goals. Architects act as both strategic advisors and hands-on leaders, bridging the gap between business and IT, and driving adoption of Salesforce Well-Architected principles. This role is a unique opportunity to create a vision and strategy for platform architecture, and to define best practices for Baird’s platform and integration strategy. This role will include a heavy leadership component to include mentoring and coaching team members, a broad impact on multiple teams, and influence at the enterprise level.

The Impact You'll Make:

Strategy

• Serve as a strategic advisor and influencer to IT leadership, business stakeholders, and delivery teams, helping shape Baird’s Salesforce roadmap with a forward-looking perspective.

• Define and communicate architecture standards, patterns, and best practices, ensuring alignment to Salesforce Well-Architected tenants (Trusted, Easy, Adaptable)

• Influence and drive the direction of platform development architecture, versions, and toolsets.

• Assist in advising the IT vision, strategy, technology innovations, licensing, and architecture services.

• Develop policies, standards, best practices, and guidelines, and communicate to teams with a focus on empowering others to implement quality value-add solutions.

• Help deliver highly technical concepts by researching and building POCs to assess viability within the Salesforce environment.

• Design, prototype, document and implement the strategic roadmap ensuring its feasibility.

• Conceptualize and design technology-based solutions within scope of the business unit application domain.

• Lead discussions around buy vs. build, declarative vs. programmatic, and cloud adoption trade-offs to ensure long-term scalability and reduced technical debt.

• Help platform teams develop solutions that enable businesses to capitalize on business insights and drive toward gaining a competitive advantage

• Strive to understand platform needs of the business community, as well as the problems faced by business users, proactively identifying platform needs, gaps, and future opportunities, aligning architecture with business outcomes.

• Demonstrate ability to perform strategic thinking by viewing initiatives both within the immediate project context as well as the overall vision.

Design

• Work with teams on high level project direction and creation of technical requirements

• Translate business requirements into scalable solution architectures.

• Communicate requirements, architecture, and test plans to platform team members.

• Help deliver highly technical concepts by researching and building POCs to assess viability within the Salesforce environment.

• Support governance processes, identifying patterns/anti-patterns and enabling continuous improvement.

• Ensure project deliverables meet overall architecture direction, including providing and owning trade-off choices, and definition of applicable test plans.

• Review system design to assure that applications will exhibit expected levels of performance, scalability, security, and appropriate reusability upon release.

• Articulate pros and cons of architectural design options and provide clear recommendations on preferred- path solution design.

• Ensure solutions are built with testability in mind, guiding testing strategy.

• Perform system and risk analysis of project features and solutions.

• Provide production problem diagnosis and technical support.

Collaborate

• Use the mentoring and paring model to build knowledge and skills to help create solid platform solutions and coach platform development principles.

• Proactively work with other members of the platform team to complete high-value deliverables as identified by business partners and team leadership

• Partner with architecture and technical teams to provide direction during POC of solutions.

• Partner with technical leaders of Baird's third-party solutions vendors to determine integration strategy into Baird's Technology Infrastructure.

• Act as the platform technical subject matter expert

• Consult with project technical leaders on trade-off decisions as required.

• Provide technical leadership, mentoring and awareness to IT and business team members

• Lead architectural design and strategy discussions.

• Guide cross-functional teams through options analysis and decision-making frameworks.

• Foster a culture of open communication and collaboration, surfacing risks and issues early.

• Demonstrate competence, experience, knowledge, understanding, and advocacy of the Salesforce Architectural Domains

• Partner with delivery managers to ensure adoption, accountability, and alignment with standards.

Learn :

• Seek out and apply new technologies and skills in daily work through conferences, online training, reading, participation in organizations and user groups, etc.

• Develop relationships with the business and seek out opportunities for continued education in the financial industry.

• Learn, research, and understand when/where Salesforce platform features could support business outcomes

• Work on projects outside domain and implement continuously improving processes.

What You'll Bring to Baird:

• The ideal candidate will possess deep expertise across Salesforce platform domains.

• As a technical leader, you will have the ability to work collaboratively to create direction with technical teams with a history of successful delivery of projects.

• Using emotional intelligence and relationship building, you are comfortable communicating with senior IT leadership, cross functional technical teams, technology vendors and key stakeholders in the Baird business.

• Demonstrating strong communication skills, you will have the opportunity to mentor and develop other Salesforce Professionals through influencing without authority.

• You will demonstrate effective decision making on architecture and design, utilizing strong requirements analysis skills.

• You will be a leader in change management, creating best practice and delivering projects efficiently and effectively.

• You have demonstrated expertise in object-oriented analysis and design, with a focus on high-quality, timely, and supportable and maintainable code delivery.

• You are comfortable working with iterative development (Agile/SCRUM/TDD methodologies, etc.), you will understand the latest technologies including cloud and mobile strategies and complex application integration.

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field (Master’s preferred).

• Experience: 7+ years of Salesforce experience, including 2+ years in an architectural or lead technical role.

• Salesforce Certified Application Architect and/or System Architect, Salesforce Certified Technical Architect (CTA) highly preferred.

• Other relevant Salesforce certifications (e.g., Platform Developer II, Integration Architecture Designer) a plus.

• Experience in Salesforce Sales Cloud, Financial Services Cloud, Experience Cloud and Marketing Cloud highly preferred.

• Experience in Apex, Lightning Web Components (LWC), Visualforce, and API integrations.

• Experience with middleware tools (e.g., MuleSoft, Informatica, Dell Boomi) and DevOps (Gearset, Copado).

• Deep understanding of data modeling, security, and identity management.

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Baird is committed to diversity and provides employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, citizenship, national origin, age, disability, military service, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, or any other status protected by law.