This role is responsible for designing, building, and optimizing Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) solutions to power Arrow Digital’s customer-focused digital experience. The ideal candidate has extensive experience in AEM architecture, component development, and cloud-based optimizations, with a deep understanding of best practices for security, performance, and scalability. This candidate should be experienced AEM Headless Architect with deep expertise in React-based front-end architectures, Server-Side Rendering (SSR), and API-driven integrations using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a pure headless CMS.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Architect end-to-end headless solutions using AEM as a content source and React/Next.js for rendering.

• Design SSR and SSG architectures leveraging Next.js or similar frameworks for high-performance and SEO-friendly sites.

• Define and implement AEM Headless content models (Content Fragments, Models, and APIs) that support omnichannel delivery.

• Architect, develop, and maintain scalable AEM components following Adobe best practices and focusing on reusability.

• Lead AEM template, workflow, and dispatcher configurations, ensuring high availability and performance.

• Guide AEM Cloud implementations, ensuring alignment with Adobe’s evolving cloud-native capabilities.

• Collaborate with system administrators, DevOps, and security teams on deployments, optimizations, and system upgrades.

• Serve as a technical leader, providing mentorship to developers and ensuring adherence to AEM development standards.

• Troubleshoot complex authoring, performance, and integration issues across the AEM platform.

• Oversee and optimize AEM integrations with Adobe CJA Analytics, Adobe Launch, and third-party services.

• Define and enforce security, accessibility, SEO, UX, and analytics best practices.

• Lead code reviews, technical design sessions, and solution architecture discussions.

• Maintain and evolve comprehensive technical documentation.

• Collaborate with stakeholders and product teams, aligning AEM capabilities with business goals.

• Provide leadership in Agile/Scrum environments, ensuring efficient sprint planning and execution.

Required Skills & Experience

• Significant hands-on experience with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM 6.x / AEM as a Cloud Service), including Sites, Assets (and optionally Forms).

• Strong Java / Java EE / OSGi / Apache Sling / HTL (Sightly) experience.

• Experience with building AEM components, templates, dialogs, services, workflows, scheduled jobs.

• Familiarity with front-end technologies: HTML5, CSS3/SCSS, JavaScript, client libraries, responsive design.

• Experience in integrating AEM with other systems: REST APIs / SOAP, CRM, marketing tools, identity management / SSO.

• Strong understanding of caching, dispatching, CDN, load balancing, performance tuning.

• Experience in upgrades / migrations of AEM or content migration (from legacy systems).

• Strong design/architectural mindset: able to make high-level design decisions, tradeoffs, and document them.

• Good leadership, communication (both technical & non-technical), and team mentoring skills.

• Familiarity with DevOps / CI-CD pipelines, environment provisioning, monitoring, logging.

• Knowledge of security best practices (authentication, authorization, vulnerabilities).

• Experience in multi-site / multi-language (MSM), headless architecture, GraphQL / SPA front ends.

 Education / Certifications

• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).

• Preferably AEM Architect or AEM Developer certification(s) from Adobe.

• Relevant certifications (e.g., cloud / security) are a plus.

Nice-to-Have / Additional (Optional)

• Experience working in eCommerce platforms and integrations.

• Experience with Adobe Experience Cloud stack: Analytics, Target, Campaign, Launch, etc.

• Experience with micro-frontends or component-based architecture.

• Experience in large scale, globally distributed environments.

• Knowledge of modern front-end frameworks (React, Angular, Vue) especially in hybrid or headless AEM setups.

• Experience with AEMaaCS or AMS (Adobe Managed Services).