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).