Architect - Technology

About the Role

We are a mutual insurance company owned by our policy holders across Iowa and South Dakota, with a reputation built on over 80 years of trust. We are motivated by the well-being of our members—our friends, family, and neighbors. If you’re passionate about joining an organization that prioritizes members, delivers best-in-class service, and is committed to sustainability and innovation, consider applying.

Wellmark is building innovative, modern solutions using cutting-edge technology. We are driving organizational transformation and business strategy by empowering our technology team to innovate new and elegant solutions to enhance the customer experience. Together, we are leaning into the future, owning outcomes, and driving organizational change.

Responsibilities

• Architecture and Solution Intent: Define and evolve logical architecture and solution intent for one or more systems and their interactions.
• Infrastructure Architecture and Platform Alignment: Define infrastructure capabilities, constraints, nonfunctional requirements, and risk treatments to support solution intent across cloud, on-premises, network, compute, storage, runtime, identity, observability, resilience, backup, recovery, and continuity concerns.
• Upstream Shaping and Feasibility: Engage in discovery, intake, portfolio, and product planning before investment decisions are committed.
• Architectural Decisions: Lead designated architectural decisions from framing through commitment. Make trade-offs explicit; identify decision owners and affected stakeholders; document decisions, rationale, and conditions for reconsideration.
• AI and Agent Architecture: Determine when AI is appropriate and select architecture patterns consistent with intended use and risk. Establish intended use, data and autonomy boundaries, human-accountability requirements, evaluation expectations, evidence standards, monitoring, and lifecycle controls.
• Standards, Guardrails, and Reuse: Apply and evolve enterprise principles, standards, reference architectures, approved patterns, and regulatory obligations.
• Lifecycle, Risk, and Technical Debt: Steward architectural integrity across introduction, change, operation, modernization, and retirement.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner with product management, business owners, engineering, data, security, infrastructure, network, platform, operations, compliance, and other architects.
• Evidence and Continuous Improvement: Maintain architecture models, decision records, risks, assumptions, standards, and conformance evidence in governed systems of record.
• System Design & Architecture: Define and evolve the end-to-end architecture of one or more systems. Develop and maintain architectural documentation (diagrams, patterns, decision records). Ensure systems are scalable, reliable, secure, and maintainable.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with engineering teams to translate business needs into technical designs. Work closely with infrastructure, security, and DevOps teams to ensure holistic architecture. Serve as the architectural point of contact for delivery teams and product owners.
• Standards & Governance: Align system architecture with enterprise architecture guidelines and principles. Participate in architecture review boards and peer design reviews. Ensure adherence to technical standards and compliance requirements.
• Lifecycle Ownership: Oversee the full system lifecycle from concept to decommissioning. Identify architectural risks and develop mitigation strategies. Support technical debt management and system evolution planning.
• Decision-Making & Documentation: Evaluate technology trade-offs and provide architectural guidance on key decisions. Maintain system-level decision logs and rationale for traceability. Advocate for sound architectural practices and long-term system health.
• Other duties as assigned.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or direct and applicable work experience.
• Minimum 7 years of experience, which may include any combination of the following:
  • Security application experience (program controls, processes, security tools such as encryption at rest, encryption in transit).
  • Cloud architecture experience (system integration, application development, system analysis).
• Minimum 4 years of cloud architecture experience, including system integration, application development, and system analysis.
• Proven experience designing and guiding complex technical systems.
• Strong understanding of software architecture principles and system integration.
• Experience collaborating across technical and non-technical teams.
• Ability to document and communicate architecture clearly and concisely.
• Familiarity with lifecycle management of systems in a large enterprise.
• Expert knowledge of network protocols and enterprise network architecture; ability to research, architect, and drive complete technical solutions involving multiple technologies.
• Experience securing workloads.
• Experience migrating to public cloud (Amazon, Google, Microsoft).
• Experience managing cloud access security brokers (CASB), including single sign-on, authorization, encryption, etc.
• Experience with SQL and NoSQL database systems.
• Demonstrated ability to be a self-starter who can lead others, focusing on results and desired outcomes.
• Flexible and adaptable to change.
• Experience managing and understanding stakeholder issues, providing clear and concise communication and counseling.
• Change agent with proven ability to influence others using appropriate skills to guide individuals or groups to accomplish work, reach consensus, or take action.
• Experience using strong business knowledge and perspective to synthesize complex information and develop logical recommendations.
• Adept at viewing situations from the stakeholder’s perspective to address their needs and expectations.
• Ability to maintain effectiveness when experiencing major changes in work tasks or the work environment.

Qualifications

• Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Knowledge of microservices, APIs, and event-driven architectures.
• Exposure to architecture frameworks (e.g., TOGAF, SAFe, Zachman).
• Experience in a regulated industry such as health insurance, healthcare, financial services, or government.
• Experience with product operating models, Lean Portfolio Management, SAFe, or comparable enterprise planning and delivery approaches.
• Experience with enterprise architecture modeling, architecture repositories, and governed architecture decision records.
• Experience defining testable architectural guardrails, fitness functions, policy-as-code, or delivery-pipeline conformance checks.
• Experience with AI, machine learning, retrieval-augmented solutions, or agent-based systems, including evaluation, monitoring, data governance, privacy, security, and human oversight.
• Depth in one or more relevant domains, such as business architecture, data, security, integration or interoperability, application, cloud, platform, infrastructure, network, resilience, or a health-plan value stream.
• Relevant architecture or domain certification.

Schedule

Travel required up to 5%.