Application Architect in Detroit, Michigan at Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan

The Application Architect is the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan’s most senior technical role, responsible for the design, delivery, and evolution of the organization’s full technology platform. This is an enterprise-first position — one that thinks in systems, builds with intention, and holds the architectural thread across a complex, interconnected stack. Salesforce sits at the center, but the scope extends to integration architecture, data engineering, cross-platform development, and the patterns that govern how the Community Foundation builds and connects its tools.

This is not a management role, but it carries real organizational weight. The Platform Architect serves as a senior technical voice in planning conversations, applies AI-assisted approaches to scale what the team can produce, and elevates the people around them through mentorship and knowledge transfer. For a technologist who wants meaningful work, genuine craft, and the latitude to build things well — without the noise of a large enterprise environment — this is a different kind of opportunity. The role reports directly to the Vice President of Technology Services

About the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan (CFSEM):
The Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan was established in 1984 to ensure residents in Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Monroe, Washtenaw, Livingston and St. Clair counties can thrive. As a permanent community endowment built by gifts from thousands of individuals and organizations, the Community Foundation supports a variety of activities benefiting economic opportunity, health equity, youth and education, arts and culture, and the environment and public spaces. Since its inception, the Community Foundation has grown to be among the top 35 community foundations in the country and has distributed more than $1.4 billion through roughly 91,000 grants to nonprofit organizations. The Community Foundation’s mission is to make southeast Michigan a desirable place to live, work and play for all residents, today and tomorrow. For more information, please visit www.cfsem.org.

Responsibilities:

Enterprise Architecture & Platform Governance

• Provide technical architecture direction across CFSEM’s platform portfolio, including platform selection, integration design, and structural planning in partnership with the VP of Technology Services.
• Establish and maintain architecture standards, patterns, and guardrails that keep the stack scalable, maintainable, and consistent as it grows.
• Evaluate proposed solutions for scalability, maintainability, and alignment to enterprise architecture principles before design is committed.
• Own the technical component of the platform architecture roadmap; partner with the TS Operations Manager on day-to-day roadmap management, prioritization, and delivery coordination.
• Identify and surface technical debt, deprecation risk, and architectural gaps to the VP of Technology Services with recommended remediation paths.

Salesforce Platform Development & Technical Leadership

• Own the technical architecture of CFSEM’s Salesforce environment, including object model, sharing model, integration surfaces, and release governance.
• Design and build complex Apex, LWC, Flow, and integration solutions. Set the standard for how the platform is built and what ‘good’ looks like.
• Define development standards and code review practices for the Salesforce platform.
• Partner with the Business Systems Analyst on requirements analysis, ensuring functional intent is translated into sound technical design.
• Coordinate release management through the TS Operations Manager; maintain deployment integrity across sandbox and production environments.

Integration Architecture & Data Engineering

• Design and govern CFSEM’s integration architecture — API design patterns, middleware configuration, event-driven flows, and platform boundary definitions.
• Own the technical architecture of data pipelines and warehouse infrastructure, ensuring data flows are reliable, auditable, and built to support downstream analytics.
• Establish integration patterns that minimize coupling and reduce operational fragility as the platform portfolio grows.
• Partner with and advise the Senior Manager of Data Governance & Analytics on governance, stewardship, and analytics strategy, bringing technical architecture perspective to inform how those workstreams are structured and sustained.
• Provide technical architecture for the financial ERP integration as CFSEM’s ERP platform evolves.

Delivery Capacity & AI-Assisted Development

• Deliver high-quality technical work across CFSEM’s technology stack, with an emphasis on Salesforce.
• Identify and implement AI-assisted development approaches — code generation, automated testing, workflow automation — that increase the team’s throughput.
• Build reusable patterns, frameworks, and tooling that allow other team members to deliver more independently and with greater consistency.
• Stay current on AI tooling relevant to software development and platform engineering; bring evaluated recommendations to the team rather than experimentation in isolation.

Cross-Platform Development

• Apply technical depth across platforms beyond Salesforce — including web application development, API services, serverless and cloud-hosted tooling, and scripting and automation — where CFSEM has delivery needs and the work benefits from senior technical involvement.
• Design and build solutions on non-Salesforce platforms that are maintainable by the broader team, not dependent on specialized knowledge that creates single points of failure.
• Partner with the VP of Technology Services to evaluate where platform-specific investment is warranted versus where lightweight, AI-assisted solutions can meet the need.

Technical Mentorship & Team Elevation

• Serve as the technical mentor and sounding board for the TS team, raising capability through code review, architectural feedback, and direct knowledge transfer.
• Contribute to documentation and shared knowledge artifacts alongside the Business Systems Analyst, who leads documentation as primary author.
• Model engineering discipline — clear technical communication, sound trade-off analysis, and practices the team can learn from and replicate.
• Inform the VP of Technology Services on emerging technologies, architectural risks, and capability gaps relevant to CFSEM’s platform trajectory.

Qualifications:

Required

• Bachelor’s degree; technical focus preferred but not required
• 20+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, enterprise architecture, or a related technical discipline
• Deep expertise in enterprise architecture principles — integration patterns, system design, API governance, and platform lifecycle management
• Expert-level Salesforce development proficiency, including Apex, LWC, Flow, SOQL, and the Salesforce security and sharing model
• Demonstrated experience designing and governing data pipelines, integration middleware, and data warehouse architectures
• Proven ability to deliver high-quality technical work across multiple platforms and technology layers
• Working familiarity with AI-assisted development tooling and a track record of applying it to improve team output
• Strong technical communication skills — able to translate architectural thinking into clear artifacts and credible stakeholder conversations
• Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and elevating team technical capability
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders
• Experience working in an Agile or iterative delivery environment

Preferred

• Salesforce Platform Developer I or II certification (or equivalent demonstrated expertise)
• Salesforce Application Architect or System Architect certification
• Experience with serverless or cloud-hosted development (Cloudflare Workers, AWS Lambda, or similar)
• Experience in a data-sensitive environment (financial services, philanthropy, or similar)
• Familiarity with nonprofit technology ecosystems, including fund accounting platforms and grantmaking systems

Core Competencies

• Customer Focus: Prioritizes understanding and addressing the needs and expectations of our community and stakeholders. Demonstrates active listening, empathy, and responsiveness, with a consistent commitment to delivering exceptional service.
• Plans and Aligns: Invests time in planning, discovery, and reflection. Engages in active mindfulness to identify and adjust mental shortcuts and assumptions. Seeks out diverse perspectives and experiences to test thinking, proactively anticipates reactions and multiple outcomes, and plans for potential issues and industry trends.
• Collaborative: Works effectively with others—within the team and cross-functionally — to achieve individual, departmental, and organizational goals. Values diverse input, shared accountability, and partnership as essential to producing strong outcomes.
• Decision Making & Problem Solving: Simplifies complex challenges using critical thinking and sound judgment. Gathers and evaluates relevant information, incorporates multiple perspectives, identifies root causes, and determines practical, effective solutions. Applies an audience-centric approach by considering the needs of stakeholders when making decisions and implementing solutions.

Benefits & Salary:

The Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan offers a robust total compensation package. The targeted salary for those entering this role is $126,000 - $158,000. In addition to a competitive base salary, benefits include but aren’t limited to 20 days of vacation accrued monthly, 5 personal days, 11 holidays, 9 sick days accrued monthly, paid parental leave, and employer paid short-/long-term disability. This position is fully remote, with a requirement to attend in-office workdays for a minimum of two days per quarter.

The Community Foundation also offers a pension retirement program after 1 year of service which contributes 10% of salary.

Application Instructions:

This position is being recruited on an expedited timeline and the deadline for all applicants is Wednesday, June 24, 2026. To apply, visit www.cfsem.org/careers and look for "Current Opportunities". Please click “Apply Now” to submit your application, including your cover letter, through the online portal.

To provide equal employment opportunities to all individuals, employment decisions will be based on merit, qualifications and abilities without regard to race, religion, creed, color, national origin, age, gender, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, height, weight, political or union affiliation, disability or any factor prohibited by law or any factor prohibited by law.