Director, Enterprise Architecture

This role partners with business, product, engineering, security, infrastructure, and operations leaders to ensure technology decisions align with enterprise priorities, approved standards, and long-term business capabilities. The position leads architecture oversight for major cross-functional initiatives, drives modernization, and develops architecture talent while improving the maturity of the Enterprise Architecture practice.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive enterprise architecture strategy, standards, governance, reference architectures, approved patterns, and technology roadmaps.
• Translate business objectives and complex requirements into scalable, secure, resilient, and cost-effective technology solutions.
• Lead architecture reviews, establish guardrails, manage architecture exceptions, and ensure solution delivery aligns with enterprise standards.
• Develop and socialize target-state architectures, operating models, modernization plans, and strategic roadmaps across business and technology stakeholders.
• Drive modernization initiatives across cloud platforms, applications, integration patterns, data architecture, security, observability, CI/CD, and DevOps practices.
• Partner with executive leadership, product teams, engineering, security, infrastructure, data, and operations to deliver integrated enterprise technology solutions.
• Provide architecture leadership for major enterprise programs involving application development, cloud transformation, integration, data migration, platform engineering, and operational resiliency.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and guide proofs of concept or proofs of value to validate architectural decisions, reduce delivery risk, and inform enterprise standards.
• Build, mentor, and develop architects and engineering leaders while fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, accountability, and engineering excellence.
• Contribute to the growth and maturity of the Enterprise Architecture practice through reusable frameworks, documented standards, decision records, best practices, and knowledge sharing.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience in software engineering, enterprise architecture, solution architecture, or technology leadership with progressive leadership responsibility.
• Experience managing, mentoring, and developing architects, engineers, and technical leaders.
• Deep experience designing distributed systems, microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, high-availability platforms, high-throughput systems, and low-latency services.
• Strong cloud architecture experience; AWS experience preferred.
• Proven success delivering enterprise-scale technology transformation, application modernization, cloud adoption, and greenfield solution delivery.
• Strong understanding of enterprise architecture domains, including application, data, technology, security, privacy, identity and access management, scalability, resiliency, observability, CI/CD, platform engineering, and DevOps.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional teams, influence executive stakeholders, and make practical technology tradeoffs across competing priorities.
• Strong business acumen with the ability to translate complex business needs into clear architectural direction and executable technology roadmaps.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical concepts in business terms.

Leadership Competencies

• Strategic enterprise thinker with the ability to connect technology direction to business outcomes.
• Strong people leader who develops technical talent and builds high-performing architecture teams.
• Clear communicator who can simplify complex topics for executive, business, and technical audiences.
• Collaborative leader who builds alignment across product, engineering, operations, security, infrastructure, and business teams.
• Practical decision-maker who balances speed, quality, cost, resiliency, security, and long-term architectural direction.
• Strong consultative approach with experience facilitating executive-level discussions, tradeoff decisions, and governance forums.

Preferred Experience

• Experience in financial services, FinTech, payments, or other highly regulated industries.
• Familiarity with TOGAF, SAFe, architecture review boards, technology governance, and enterprise architecture operating models.
• Experience leading architecture modernization in cloud-native, API-first, event-driven, and platform-oriented environments.
• Experience establishing architecture standards, reusable patterns, reference architectures, governance forums, and architecture decision records.

Schedule

Hybrid - Western Union values in-person collaboration, problem solving, and ideation whenever possible. The expectation is to work from the office a minimum of three days a week.

Benefits

• Paid Time Off
• Medical, Dental and Life Insurance
• Tuition Assistance Program
• Student Loan Repayment (below manager level only)
• Parental Leave
• One day volunteer time off
• $0 Money Transfer Fee Discount
• Code – Quarterly Recognition Program
• “Game Changers” Employee Discount Program
• Global Adoption Assistance
• Global Scholarship Awards Program
• 401K plan

Pay

The on-target earnings range is $265,000-$280,000 per year, which includes a base salary and short-term and long-term incentives that align with individual and company performance. Actual salaries will vary based on candidates’ qualifications, skills, and competencies.