Director, Solutions Architect - Legal, Risk & Compliance

This Architect role is focused on driving architecture strategy, roadmap development, and continuous evolution of TIAA's Legal, Risk & Compliance technology portfolio.

Responsibilities

• Architecture Strategy & Roadmap: Drive the development and continuous evolution of the spanning Legal, Risk & Compliance architecture roadmaps. Define capability maps that articulate current state, target state, and transformation pathways, while establishing reference architectures and design patterns that promote consistency, reusability, and scalability across the portfolio.
• Enterprise Alignment & Governance: Partner with the Enterprise Architecture team to ensure Legal, Risk & Compliance Technology solutions align with company-wide architectural principles and standards. Lead architectural governance processes, represent the Legal, Risk & Compliance Functions Technology team in Technical Architecture Governance forums and the AI Center of Excellence, and ensure all solutions meet enterprise standards and strategic objectives.
• Stakeholder Collaboration & Business Translation: Collaborate with business stakeholders across Legal, Risk & Compliance to translate business requirements into sound technical and architectural solutions. Influence without formal authority to drive best practices and standards adoption across diverse stakeholder groups in a fast-paced environment.
• Process Optimization & Capability Development: Lead business process modeling and value stream analysis to identify optimization opportunities and support continuous improvement. Develop and maintain business capability models and maturity assessments to surface gaps, inform investment decisions, and support TIAA's evolution toward a product-centric operating model.
• Technology Selection & AI Enablement: Define Build vs. Buy decision principles and technology selection criteria tailored to Corporate Technology needs. Prioritize evaluation of vendor AI solutions before committing to custom builds to optimize cost, functionality, and time to value. Recommend AI and automation solutions — including GenAI and Agentic approaches — to close identified automation gaps and advance the multiyear technology roadmap.
• Delivery Support & Documentation: Provide architectural guidance, oversight, and governance throughout the project delivery lifecycle. Establish and maintain architectural documentation, standards, and guidelines that support consistent, scalable solution delivery.

Requirements

• 8+ years of progressive experience in enterprise architecture, solution architecture, or related technical leadership roles (10+ years preferred).
• Experience in financial services.
• Experience with cloud technologies, modern architecture patterns, and/or enterprise integration approaches.

Qualifications

• Preference for experience in Legal, Risk & Compliance, Finance, or HR technology domains.
• Proven track record of leading architectural initiatives in complex, regulated environments.
• Experience with enterprise architecture tenets including Technical Debt Management, Application Lifecycle Management, Products Portfolio Management.
• Ability to influence without authority and drive consensus across diverse stakeholder groups in fast-paced evolving environments.
• Experience with Domain Driven Design, Data Mesh, AI, GenAI, Agentic, and capability-driven architecture methodologies.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills with experience in executive stakeholder management.
• Experience working in individual contributor roles while providing technical leadership across multiple teams.

Skills

• Application Programming Interface (API) Development/Integration
• Cloud Platforms
• Data Management
• Domain-Driven Design
• Enterprise Application Integration
• Enterprise Architecture
• Influence
• Innovation
• Problem Solving
• Scalability/Reliability
• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Software Development
• Strategic Planning
• Systems Design/Analysis

Pay

Base Pay Range: $165,000/yr - $255,000/yr. Actual base salary may vary based upon, but not limited to, relevant experience, time in role, base salary of internal peers, prior performance, business sector, and geographic location. In addition to base salary, the competitive compensation package may include participation in an incentive program linked to performance.

Benefits

The organization is committed to making financial well-being possible for its clients, and is equally committed to the well-being of our associates. That’s why we offer a comprehensive Total Rewards package designed to make a positive difference in the lives of our associates and their loved ones. Our benefits include a superior retirement program and highly competitive health, wellness and work life offerings that can help you achieve and maintain your best possible physical, emotional and financial well-being.