Job Title: Solution Engineer Lead
Location: Columbus, OH
Work Model: Onsite
Potential to convert - client does not sponsor. Please list if candidate is willing/able to convert on resume.
Local candidates (Columbus) strongly preferred. May consider non-local candidates in client Service territory or in Chicago area. Please ensure candidate location is clearly listed on resume.
POSITION OVERVIEW
client Energy is seeking an experienced, hands-on technical leader to help establish and mature internal application support for its business application portfolio. This role will lead technical support, engineering, reliability, and lifecycle direction for the business application portfolio.
The successful candidate will work at the intersection of software engineering, production support, data processing, system integration, and business operations. This person will help transfer critical application knowledge into a sustainable internal support model, improve monitoring and recovery, address technical debt, and lead enhancements that allow the business to operate and grow with confidence.
This is a technical leadership role rather than a traditional people-management position. The Solution Engineer Lead will provide technical direction to application-support engineers and coordinate effectively with business subject-matter experts, enterprise technology teams, external service providers, and distributed development resources.
The Solution Engineer Lead Business Applications serve as the principal technical owner and escalation point for the application portfolio. The role is primarily responsible for applications supporting Risk and Pricing and Transport, including data-intensive pricing solutions, an enterprise energy-trading and risk-management platform, supporting databases, scheduled processes, interfaces, reports, and related operational tools.
The lead will establish the architecture, engineering, production-support, monitoring, release, documentation, and recovery practices required to support these applications internally. The position will lead complex incident diagnosis, determine when specialized external support is required, guide technical enhancements, and ensure that knowledge is distributed across the team rather than concentrated with individual subject-matter experts.
The role will also coordinate with packaged-software providers, custom-development partners, market-data services, SaaS platforms, and internal infrastructure, database, security, release, and business teams.
WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING
Establish Technical Ownership
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.
Lead Architecture and Engineering
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.
Improve Production Reliability
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.
Build Internal Capability
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.
Support Application and Service Lifecycles
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.
WHAT S NEEDED
Technical Leadership
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.
Data-Intensive Application Experience
Advanced experience with relational databases, complex SQL, stored procedures, batch processing, data reconciliation, and performance tuning.
Strong experience with either Microsoft SQL Server/T-SQL or Oracle/SQL, with the ability to work effectively across both platforms.
Experience diagnosing data-completeness, data-quality, transformation, and downstream reconciliation problems.
Ability to understand applications in which significant business logic resides in stored procedures, scheduled jobs, configuration, files, and interfaces.
Application and Integration Engineering
Experience supporting and enhancing enterprise applications, APIs, scheduled processes, file-based exchanges, and system integrations.
Working knowledge of application languages and frameworks such as C#/.NET, Java, REST APIs, and related integration technologies.
Experience with cloud and DevOps practices, source control, automated deployment, release management, rollback, and environment promotion.
Ability to analyze solutions that combine packaged software, custom extensions, databases, spreadsheets, external integrations, and operational processes.
Operational Leadership
Experience supporting business-critical production applications with stringent recovery expectations.
Strong root-cause analysis, incident leadership, problem-management, and risk-assessment skills.
Ability to balance urgent production support with longer-term engineering and modernization work.
Willingness and ability to provide after-hours production support when business needs require it.
Business and Stakeholder Partnership
Ability to translate business processes and operating risks into technical requirements and support practices.
Strong written and verbal communication skills with technical and nontechnical audiences.
Experience partnering with business SMEs, infrastructure teams, database teams, security, external providers, and distributed development teams.
Energy trading, risk, pricing, commodity, financial, or other data-intensive industry experience is preferred but not required.
Responsibilities
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
Experience across the following technology categories is relevant. Candidates are not expected to have prior experience with every listed technology.
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.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Medical, dental, and vision insurance
401(k)
Other standard benefits as applicable
Distribution List: IT/Technical
ABOUT UNICON
UNICON is a workforce solutions provider with over 35 years of experience supporting organizations across a variety of industries. We partner with our clients to deliver skilled professionals while maintaining a strong focus on quality, compliance, and long-term relationships. UNICON is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.