Description

Blue Slate Solutions is looking for Senior Business Consultants. The consultants will work within our project teams, partnering with clients to design, implement and lead value-based solutions to complex business problems. In addition, Senior Business Consultants will support the sales process and mentor others on the consulting team, while identifying, sharing, and reusing industry and discipline best practices. Senior Business Consultants often work across more than one project or client and may be responsible for leading programs.  At the senior level, consultants should possess deep industry knowledge and business understanding.

The role may require up to 80% travel. Our consultants are solution and client driven, and therefore may work at the client's site from Monday through Thursday. For some clients or projects, or portions of projects, this may not be a requirement.

Specific Activities for the Senior Business Consultant

• Build relationships with clients and prospects
• Lead project teams, plan and manage programs / projects
• Expertly perform business analysis in the following disciplines:
  • Solution design and ROI-based, multi-generational program planning
  • Process definition, analysis, and re-engineering
  • Market research and analysis
  • Tool / solution analysis and selection
  • Requirements definition and rules harvesting
• Mentor and lead the performance of others on the consulting team
• Champion and drive quality throughout the project lifecycle
• Identify, share, and reuse best practices to promote growth of team, quality of work product and collective knowledge
• Participate in pre-sales consulting, solution design, and project planning
   

Skills and experience required

• BS/BA degree in Business, Computer Science, Information Technology, Information Sciences, or related field
• 7+ years work experience in a related industry (Healthcare, Insurance, Financial Services)
• Understanding of the application of current technologies (BPM, SOA, etc.) to business problems
• Ability to plan, manage, and lead projects
• Computer proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite
• Excellent interpersonal and written and oral communication skills
• Strong analytical and problem solving skills
• Effective team member and leader, capable of self-directed work
• Passion for excellence and an entrepreneurial spirit

Skills and experience preferred

• MBA, MIS, CPA, or other advanced degree
• Quality (e.g., Six Sigma) trained/certified
• 2-5 years consulting experience, preferably in Healthcare, Insurance, or Financial Services
• Prior experience with business process management technologies (workflow, business rules, business intelligence, etc.)

Description

Our Senior Solution Architect serves as the senior technical resource and the technical solution expert on Blue Slate’s client engagements teams. This role works directly with Blue Slate’s customers to understand their highest priority business needs and then architect and implement creative solutions that meet the needs of the customer. The ideal candidate will have in-depth knowledge of systems architecture with a proven track record of designing and implementing technology solutions in a large, complex environment. This candidate must also have good organizational skills, including the capability to break down complex enterprise needs spanning multiple applications into multi-phased, integrated solution plans that can be implemented by the Blue Slate team. The Senior Solution Architect must possess a deep knowledge in multiple technology areas that allow them to integrate between the various technologies in use in an enterprise environment.  Being a key part of the delivery team, the Senior Solutions Architect should expect to spend about 35% of his or her time architecting solutions with the balance being participation in a hands-on delivery role, designing and building solutions.

Specific Activities and Responsibilities

• Coordinates complex technical projects and initiatives across technology and functional lines, providing leadership for technical and non-technical team members.
• Provides expertise surrounding idioms within procedural, object oriented, aspect oriented, rules-based, workflow-based and service oriented paradigms
• Leads architecture redesign efforts including reverse engineering, future-state designs, to-be migrations, logical and physical mappings
• Assures alignment between business and IT in terms of strategies, goals and objectives.
• Participates as a member of Blue Slate delivery teams responsible for designing, integrating, and building enterprise solutions.
• Understands and provides leadership around security throughout all SDLC phases and all tiers of the architecture and the systems running within the architecture. This includes identity management solution approaches.
• Conduct and participate in architecture reviews to capture business objectives and walkthrough architecture solutions.
• Provide technical leadership to other consultants and lead teams in the completion of complex engagement solutions.
• Manage sets of resources crossing multiple projects, including balancing and adjusting to anticipated and unanticipated project needs.
• Identify and articulate one-time versus reusable solution aspects, documenting and publishing reusable solution components across the company.
• Support Business Development efforts in architect-driven pre-sales initiatives
• Perform other duties as indicated

Skills and Experience Required

• Has mastery across common artifacts used in common SDLCs. For example UML, entity Relationship, Flow charts, System diagrams and network diagrams
• Proficient with a set of programming and scripting languages, understanding the requirements, strengths and weaknesses of each
• Well versed in enterprise IT operational issues such as clustering, cloud-based solutions, multi-threading, stateless/stateful services and 24/7 operations.
• Ability to translate business needs into solution architecture requirements
• Ability to define multiple solution options to business problems.
• Ability to quickly comprehend the functions and capabilities of new technologies.
• Ability to articulate the effect of technology on business.
• Knowledge of consultative skills including analysis, influencing, negotiation, account management and relationship building.
• Ability to form strong and trusting relationships with clients, vendors and team members
• Deep understanding of database design and technology including tuning, normalization, warehousing, data mining, and reporting.
• Thoroughly versed in web technologies including web services, AJAX, web page generation and scripting.
• Diverse hands-on experience leveraging Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigms including infrastructure service options, messaging styles, and canonical design.
• Knowledgeable with network and application service-based solutions such as proxies, load balancers, caching and service buses
• Conversant with networking technologies and approaches such as routers, firewalls, load balancers, IPS/IDS, VPNs, sub-nets and DMZs.
• Experienced with multiple open source and COTS solutions for each architectural tier (e.g. network monitoring, database management, reporting, SDLC documentation, SCCS, application development, content management, middleware, testing, deployment and application monitoring)
• Excellent interpersonal and written & oral communication skills
• Strong analytical and problem solving skills
• Capable of working independently
• Effective team member and leader
• Passion for excellence and an entrepreneurial spirit to develop future business
• Must be willing to travel 80%
   

Description

The Senior Consulting Software Engineer works with the customer, project manager and analyst to design, construct, integrate, test and deploy enterprise-level applications. This individual may be called upon to perform analysis tasks based on project needs and staffing.

The typical tasks for the Senior Consulting Software Engineer include applying architectural tenants to projects, creating OO-design artifacts (e.g. class diagrams, sequence diagrams), creating prototypical applications as proof-of-concepts, creating software solutions using industry standard tools and languages, integrating partner and other vendors’ products, assisting QA to assure stability of the solution, mentoring junior team members and working with the client to deploy the solution.

The individual should be well versed in OO design, including the use of UML. He or she should also be fluent in Java and willing to pursue other languages, such as C++, C#, or VB.NET. Experience with multiple platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, Solaris, and Linux, is preferred.

It is expected that the individual will also have expertise with a diverse set of complementary technologies, and will continue to pursue such knowledge. Technologies such as SQL and RDBMS, Web Services, Message Queues, XML, Networking, Business Rule Engines, Workflow environments, Document Management Systems and Web Application Servers constitute the infrastructure on which we design, build and deploy solutions. The Senior Consulting Software Engineer must understand the uses and operation of these technologies. He or she must also have intimate knowledge around a subset of these technologies, including configuration, integration and operation of several. Further, the individual is expected to have thorough experience with SDLC frameworks, Design and Build Tools as well as Automated Testing Tools.

The Senior Consulting Software Engineer will typically spend 30% of his of her time providing guidance to more junior consulting software engineers and the balance in a hands-on delivery role; designing, building and testing software-based solutions.

This position will involve up to 80% travel.

Specific Activities for the Senior Consulting Software Engr

• Understand client needs from both a functional and technical perspective
• Work with clients to define, analyze and engineer sound IT-based solutions for their unique business processes and rules
• Given the client's business and technology environments, document the detailed technical specifications based upon the documented functional requirements
• Design, code and test proprietary solutions for unique business or systems requirements, such as an integration tier in front of a legacy system
• Code and configure automated business processes and rules using specialized software, such as rules or workflow engines, or by developing custom applications
• Lead the testing of solutions, at unit, integration and system levels. This includes specialized testing such as performance and fail-over
• Integrate software solutions into a production environment
• Mentor less experienced designers and developers, applying best practices and assuring quality delivery
• Train the client on utilization of new processes, tools and solutions

Skills and experience required

• Strong OO design background including UML and design patterns
• Deep understanding of SDLC, covering various waterfall and agile frameworks
• 8 years of Java design and programming experience (J2SE, JDBC, Swing)
• 6 year of Java EE design and programming experience (Servlets, JSPs, EJB, JMS)
• Broad hands-on experience with traditional web standards such as HTTP, HTML, XHTML, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets and AJAX
• Knowledgeable with multiple Java frameworks such as Spring, Struts, JSF and Hibernate
• BS degree in Information Technology or related field
• Excellent interpersonal and written & oral communication skills
• Strong analytical and problem solving skills
• Has utilized various design and development tools, such as MagicDraw, Ant, and Eclipse
• XML/XSL/XSLT experience
• Web Services, including hands-on work with SOAP and UDDI
• Experience with different testing types and able to articulate value of each
• 5 years of experience with Java application servers, including significant debugging of deployment and operational issues
• Experience with “JAX Pack” (JAX-RPC, JAXB, …) and a solid understanding of object serialization, XML marshaling/unmarshaling, and similar interoperability approaches
• System integration experience, such as using messaging services and middleware
• Versed in complementary technologies, such as SQL, Networking, and SCCS
• Able to participate as an individual contributor on large and small development projects
• Capable of working independently
• Able to work within tight schedules and budgets

Skills and experience preferred

• 7-10 years of design and development experience on platforms such as Solaris, Windows, C++, DBMS (i.e. Oracle, Sybase, or MS SQL), MQ Series, and similar
• Experience carrying out analysis tasks, such as gathering user requirements, running requirements sessions, and developing process maps and use cases
• Experience with portal products and architectures
• Experience with SSO environments and operation
• LDAP implementation experience
• Experienced, comfortable, and conversant with the offshore development model, including rewards and challenges
• MS in Computer Science
• Oracle (Sun) Java Certified
• 2-5 years consulting experience, preferably in Healthcare, CRM, or Financial Services
• Prior experience with BRMS packages such as PegaRULES, JRules, JBoss BRMS or Blaze
• Has experienced project failures and learned from them