Risepoint is an education technology company that provides world-class support and trusted expertise to more than 100 universities and colleges. We primarily work with regional universities, helping them develop and grow their high-ROI, workforce-focused online degree programs in critical areas such as nursing, teaching, business, and public service. Risepoint is dedicated to increasing access to affordable education so that more students, especially working adults, can improve their careers and meet employer and community needs.

At Risepoint, we are on a mission to redefine higher education for the modern world. We empower learners and partners by delivering transformative, scalable, and student-centric solutions. As we grow and evolve in becoming a tech-enabled higher education service company, we are committed to delivering an outstanding digital student journey grounded in care, simplicity, and real outcomes.

We operate at speed, guided by our core values—Reliable, Empowered, Adaptable, Customer-Centric, and Heart (R.E.A.C.H)—and united by a belief in the power of impact-driven, collaborative leadership.

Role Overview

Risepoint is seeking an Enterprise Architect to define and drive enterprise technology architecture across platforms, integrations, data, and security. This role establishes architectural standards and reference designs that enable teams to deliver scalable, secure, resilient systems—while reducing complexity, improving interoperability, and accelerating delivery across the end-to-end online university program lifecycle (e.g., marketing, recruitment, admissions, onboarding, student support, academic progression).

This is a hands-on architecture role: you will produce actionable designs, guide engineering teams through reviews and tradeoffs, and ensure solutions are buildable, operable, and aligned to enterprise principles.

Key Responsibilities

· Enterprise target architecture: Define and maintain current-state and target-state architectures across domains (application, integration, data, and security). Create roadmaps to modernize platforms and reduce technical debt.

· Reference architectures & standards: Establish reusable patterns for microservices, APIs, event-driven systems, identity, and shared platform capabilities. Maintain architecture decision records (ADRs) and enforce guardrails via review processes.

· Integration architecture: Define enterprise integration strategy (API gateway, event streaming, middleware, service-to-service auth). Drive standards for idempotency, traceability, data contracts, and schema evolution across systems.

· Data & platform architecture alignment: Partner with data/platform teams to ensure consistent architecture for data flows, governance, quality, and lineage that supports enterprise reporting and operational needs.

· Security-by-design: Embed security, privacy, and compliance controls into architecture (least privilege, encryption, secrets management, audit logging, retention). Partner with security on threat modeling and risk reviews.

· Non-functional excellence: Define SLOs/SLIs, resilience patterns, observability requirements, and operational readiness criteria for production systems.

· Architecture leadership: Lead design reviews, mentor engineers, and influence cross-functional stakeholders. Translate business goals into technical decisions with clear tradeoffs (time/cost/risk/quality).

Qualifications

· Strong Computer Science foundation and depth in distributed systems, networking, and modern software architecture.

· Hands-on coding capability: ability to write production-quality code, build reference implementations, and perform high-signal code reviews (not “slideware-only” architecture).

· 8+ years designing enterprise-scale systems (cloud-native architecture, APIs, microservices, event-driven patterns).

· Proven experience defining and driving adoption of architecture standards and reference patterns across multiple delivery teams.

· Strong experience with enterprise integration (API management, IAM, service-to-service auth, messaging/streaming, data contracts).

· Strong experience with operability (observability, reliability engineering practices, incident readiness, performance and capacity considerations).

· Excellent communication skills—able to align leaders and teams around technical direction and drive decisions through ambiguity.

Preferred

· Experience supporting complex ecosystems involving partner-integrated workflows and constraints (e.g., CRM/SIS/LMS-connected processes).

· Experience building and governing enterprise architecture processes (architecture review boards, standards catalogs, reference architecture libraries).

· Familiarity with integrations, APIs, middleware, and data pipelines in university ecosystems.

Risepoint is an equal-opportunity employer and supports a diverse and inclusive workforce.