Manifest Solutions is currently seeking a Solution Engineer Lead for an onsite position in Columbus, OH.
- Become the senior technical owner for the business applications portfolio.
- Develop a working understanding of business-critical processes, operating calendars, peak periods, dependencies, and recovery expectations.
- Define sustainable ownership boundaries across internal support teams, business users, infrastructure teams, database teams, and external service providers.
- Serve as the senior technical escalation point for complex incidents, recurring defects, data-quality issues, performance problems, and integration failures.
- Assess the current architecture of data-intensive pricing applications, an enterprise energy-trading and risk-management platform, databases, scheduled processing, interfaces, reports, and supporting tools.
- Establish practical technical standards for maintainability, reliability, security, data integrity, testing, deployment, and recovery.
- Lead the design and implementation of application enhancements, integrations, monitoring, automation, and technical-debt reduction.
- Review code, stored procedures, configurations, deployment plans, and technical designs produced by internal or external developers.
- Ensure that changes account for upstream data dependencies and downstream pricing, risk, trading, settlement, billing, and reporting impacts.
- Define monitoring, alerting, support, and recovery practices for mission-critical application processes.
- Improve visibility into scheduled jobs, interface failures, missing or incomplete data, application health, and processing outcomes.
- Lead root-cause analysis and ensure that recurring incidents result in durable corrective action.
- Establish runbooks, support procedures, recovery steps, and operational acceptance criteria.
- Provide after-hours support leadership when business-critical incidents or operating periods require it.
- Provide technical direction and mentorship to application-support engineers.
- Establish cross-training and backup coverage across Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, application, interface, and scheduled-processing responsibilities.
- Coordinate knowledge transfer from existing business SMEs, technical SMEs, external providers, and contractors.
- Use distributed or external development capacity effectively while retaining internal accountability for architecture, quality, and production outcomes.
- Build a support model that can maintain and enhance the applications without depending indefinitely on individual experts or external intervention.
- Lead technical planning for packaged-application upgrades and future application-lifecycle decisions.
- Coordinate with external providers on defects, patches, supported versions, technical limitations, and product roadmaps.
- Support the transition to a SaaS platform where technical leadership, integration knowledge, or transition coordination is needed.
- Evaluate longer-term modernization opportunities without disrupting critical business operations.
- Demonstrated experience leading technical design, complex troubleshooting, application modernization, and production recovery.
- Ability to provide technical direction without relying on formal reporting authority.
- Experience mentoring developers, reviewing technical work, and establishing engineering standards.
- Sound judgment about when to repair, enhance, modernize, replace, or escalate an application or component.
- Own technical architecture and engineering direction for the application portfolio.
- Lead complex production incident diagnosis, recovery, root-cause analysis, and corrective-action planning.
- Establish and maintain technical standards for development, testing, deployment, monitoring, security, documentation, and support.
- Lead technical knowledge transfer and ensure effective primary and backup coverage for critical applications and processes.
- Design or oversee application enhancements, integrations, data validations, automated controls, and performance improvements.
- Review source code, stored procedures, configurations, deployment packages, technical designs, and externally produced changes.
- Establish monitoring and alerting for application failures, scheduled processes, interfaces, incomplete data, and abnormal processing results.
- Develop and maintain architecture diagrams, technical documentation, support runbooks, recovery procedures, and dependency records.
- Coordinate releases, upgrades, patches, environment changes, rollback plans, and production validation.
- Lead technical interactions with packaged-software providers, custom-development partners, market-data services, SaaS platforms, and other external technology partners.
- Partner with business leaders and SMEs to prioritize production needs, risks, improvements, and enhancements.
- Coordinate with enterprise architecture, infrastructure, database, identity and access, cybersecurity, service management, and release teams.
- Promote compliance with change-management, access-control, audit, security, and applicable regulatory requirements.
- Mentor application-support engineers and help build a collaborative, accountable, and cross-trained team.
- Support Choice and adjacent retail-energy platforms when required for continuity, integration troubleshooting, or transition work.
Minimum Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical field. An equivalent combination of education and relevant experience may be considered.
- 10+ years of relevant software development, application engineering, integration, or production-support experience, including demonstrated technical leadership of complex enterprise applications.
- Advanced relational-database and SQL experience, with significant experience in SQL Server/T-SQL, Oracle/SQL, or comparable enterprise database technologies.
- Experience designing, supporting, or troubleshooting data-intensive applications and scheduled processing.
- Experience with application integrations, REST APIs, file exchanges, and data interfaces.
- Experience with at least one enterprise development technology such as C#/.NET or Java.
- Experience with source control, CI/CD, release management, testing, environment promotion, and rollback.
- Experience leading high-severity incident response and root-cause analysis.
- Experience producing technical documentation, architecture diagrams, operating procedures, and support runbooks.
- Ability to provide after-hours production support when business-critical needs require it.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with an enterprise energy-trading, risk-management, or commodity-management platform.
- Experience supporting energy pricing, risk, trading, scheduling, settlement, or billing processes.
- Experience with Azure, Azure DevOps, GitHub, IIS, Power Automate, or related enterprise technologies.
- Experience managing technical work performed by external providers, contractors, or distributed development teams.
- Relevant cloud, database, software-engineering, ITIL, or DevOps certifications.
Competencies
- Technical Leadership: Establishes direction, makes sound technical decisions, and guides others through complex work.
- Operational Ownership: Accepts accountability for system reliability, incident response, recovery, and continuous improvement.
- Systems Thinking: Understands how applications, data, integrations, people, controls, and business processes affect one another.
- Problem Solving: Diagnoses complex issues using evidence, identifies root causes, and implements durable solutions.
- Risk Awareness: Recognizes production, data, security, compliance, external-dependency, and continuity risks before they become incidents.
- Communication: Explains complex technical issues clearly and adapts communication to the audience.
- Collaboration: Builds productive relationships across business, technology, provider, and leadership teams.
- Mentorship: Develops technical capability in others and promotes documentation, cross-training, and shared ownership.
- Adaptability: Works effectively across packaged applications, custom software, legacy components, SaaS solutions, and evolving business priorities.
Technologies and Tools
- Databases and Data: Microsoft SQL Server, T-SQL, stored procedures, Oracle, SQL, data reconciliation, data validation, and performance tuning.
- Applications: Data-intensive pricing solutions and enterprise energy-trading, risk-management, or commodity-management platforms.
- Development and Integration: C#/.NET, Java, REST APIs, IIS, scheduled and batch processing, and file/SFTP interfaces.
- Cloud and DevOps: Microsoft Azure, Azure DevOps, GitHub or Git, CI/CD pipelines, automated deployment, and rollback.
- Automation and Operations: Monitoring and alerting tools, job scheduling, workflow automation, and IT service-management tools.
- Business Interfaces: Excel-based operational tools, pricing templates, data feeds, reports, and reconciliation processes.
- Adjacent Platforms: SaaS solutions, retail-energy platforms, market-data services, and other externally managed applications.
