Enterprise Architect

What You Will Do (core Responsibilities)

• Enterprise architecture strategy
• Define and maintain enterprise architecture vision, principles, target-state architectures, and multi-year roadmaps aligned to business strategy.
• Drive modernization, rationalization, and simplification across applications, platforms, and data domains spanning customer identity, underwriting/risk, fraud, pricing/discounting, payments/collections, servicing, customer engagement and customer communications.
• Federated architecture leadership (matrix influence)
• Lead enterprise architecture outcomes in a federated model by partnering with embedded architects across cloud, network, security, commerce, mobile, and platform engineering.
• Align enterprise standards and target-state direction with platform reference architectures and ensure consistent adoption across product pods.
• Influence cross-team decisions through architecture forums, ADRs, and exception governance – driving outcomes without direct reporting authority.
• Architecture governance and decisioning
• Lead architecture reviews (L2/L3, design authority, ARB) focused on cross-domain decisions – domain boundaries, integration approach, data contracts, security objectives, NFRs, exceptions.
• Establish lightweight, outcome-based guardrails that support agile delivery – reference architectures, patterns, and decision records.
• Maintain ADRs, exception management, and time bound remediation plans.
• Cross-domain architecture leadership
• Partner with Solution Architects and Engineering Leads to design end-to-end solutions align with enterprise target state, domain boundaries, reference architectures, and cross-domain standards for data, integration, security, NFRs.
• Ensure architectural consistency across product pods and shared platforms (customer identity & profile, commerce, underwriting services, servicing platforms, communication & engagement platforms, integrating/eventing, data/analytics, security).
• Standards, reference architectures, and reuse
• Develop and publish enterprise reference architectures and standards for:
• Integration (API/event/streaming)
• Data/analytics
• Identity/IAM
• Security by design
• Observability
• Resiliency
• DevSecOps
• Create interoperability guardrails across platforms.
• Create reusable patterns and components to reduce time-to-market and improve reliability especially around data contracts, event schemas, identity resolution, decisioning workflows, and auditability.
• Portfolio and technology planning
• Influence investment decisions by translating architecture options into tradeoffs – cost, time, risk scalability, maintainability, operability, vendor lock-in.
• Support vendor evaluations and build-vs-buy recommendations with clear criteria and decision records – especially where solutions cross domains or create enterprise-wide dependencies.
• Risk, security, and compliance
• Embed security and compliance into enterprise design – zero trust objectives, IAM, encryption/tokenization where needed, privacy-by-design, audit logging, data retention.
• Partner with Security/GRC and Risk to ensure architectures meet regulatory obligations and internal controls common to financial services.
• Focus on security objectives and design patterns; collaborate with embedded security architects for control implementation details.
• Data and integration architecture
• Define enterprise data architecture guardrails (canonical models, master/reference data, lineage, governance, access controls) and integration strategy (APIs/events/streaming).
• Ensure clean interoperability between operational systems and analytics/AI platforms through consistent contracts, metadata, and access patterns.
• Enterprise AI/GenAI architecture
• Define enterprise AI patterns and guardrails: secure RAG, least-privilege data access, governance, evaluation and monitoring, prompt/response logging where appropriate, and cost/latency guardrails for inference.
• Partner with data/AI teams and platform teams to move AI from POCs to production with strong operational rigor.
• Architecture artifacts and communication
• Maintain capability maps, architecture diagrams, target-state roadmaps, ADRs, and standards in an accessible repository.
• Communicate complex concepts clearly to executives and delivery teams – what changes, why it matters, and tradeoffs.

Required Qualifications

• 8 – 15+ years in architecture roles (enterprise, domain, or principal engineering) with demonstrated cross-domain impact.
• Strong understanding of business capability modeling, application/integration architecture, data architecture, enterprise technology guardrails, and security-by-design.
• Experience operating in federated/matrix environment, influencing architects and engineering leaders without direct reporting authority.
• Proven experience establishing target-state architectures, roadmaps, and governance that supports agile teams.
• Ability to lead tradeoff discussions with executives and delivery teams – cost/risk/time/value.
• Excellent communication skills; ability to produce executive-ready artifacts.
• Experience in Fintech, lending, specialty financing, payments, or regulated financial services.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or scaling an EA practice – operating model, standards, governance, reference architectures.
• Experience in large-scale modernization – legacy rationalization, cloud migration, platform transformation.
• Familiarity with architecture frameworks.
• Experience with event-driven architecture, API management, and data platforms/warehouse/lakehouse patterns.
• Experience with security architecture concepts – zero trust, IAM, data protection, and compliance environments.
• Experience with AI/GenAI architecture patterns (RAG, evaluation, monitoring, LLMOps) in enterprise environments.