Senior Application Architect

About the role

At UE, you will join a collaborative, mission-driven team committed to delivering flexible insurance solutions, responsive service, and meaningful value to the institutions we serve. The Senior Application Architect is responsible for developing and evolving UE’s application-layer architecture following the Agile Software Development Life Cycle.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end application architecture for key business systems, including domain modeling, application decomposition, service boundaries, and integration patterns.
• Define and own UE’s API strategy, including RESTful API design standards, documentation, versioning, lifecycle management, and governance.
• Design and govern REST APIs and service contracts that enable reuse, scalability, and consistent integration across internal applications and external partners.
• Collaborate with business and technical stakeholders to translate strategic objectives and functional needs into application architecture, REST API designs, and implementation approaches.
• Develop and maintain technical and business feature roadmaps in consultation with stakeholders; identify risks, track progress, and communicate status updates to project sponsors.
• Lead the design and implementation of scalable, secure, and resilient enterprise application architectures, with a focus on maintainability, extensibility, and performance.
• Define and enforce application architecture standards, design patterns, and coding guidelines to ensure consistency and interoperability across development teams.
• Review application and API implementations to ensure adherence to architectural intent, clean code principles, and design patterns.
• Lead application modernization and refactoring efforts, including decomposition of legacy systems into modular or service-aligned architectures.
• Evaluate emerging technologies—including AI, ML, and application integration frameworks—through proofs of concept and pilot implementations, focusing on application-level feasibility and business value.
• Architect, prototype, and build hands-on components of AI-enabled application capabilities, such as generative AI.
• Partner with data engineering teams to design application-aligned data access patterns, pipelines, and governance supporting analytics and machine learning initiatives.
• Engage directly in complex solution development when needed, contributing application code, prototypes, and architectural exemplars.
• Integrate security, privacy, and compliance requirements into application and API design in alignment with UE governance standards.
• Engineer applications and APIs for reliability, scalability, and performance by proactively identifying and resolving architectural bottlenecks.
• Mentor developers and other architects, fostering a culture of hands-on learning, strong design discipline, and technical excellence.
• Lead vendor and product evaluations from an application and API architecture perspective, assessing extensibility, integration capability, and alignment with UE’s application roadmap.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field; advanced degree preferred
• Typically requires 10+ years of experience in software design and development, including at least 5 years of architecting enterprise-level applications
• Demonstrated experience designing and evolving application architecture, rather than primarily infrastructure, cloud, or data architecture
• Proven experience defining and implementing RESTful API strategies, including API design, versioning, documentation, security, and governance
• Experience making architectural decisions across application layers, including UI, backend services, REST APIs, and data access
• Skilled in database modeling, relationship design, and writing queries and stored procedures in support of application needs
• Working knowledge of cloud platforms and DevOps practices as they relate to application deployment and runtime concerns; this role does not own cloud infrastructure architecture
• Experience working in Agile delivery environments, collaborating across teams to deliver iterative, high-quality application solutions
• Strong understanding of application security and enterprise architecture, supported by hands-on leadership in large-scale application and API design
• Experience collaborating with data engineering teams to support application-driven analytics and data initiatives
• Excellent analytical, communication, and problem-solving skills, with the ability to lead through influence and adapt to evolving priorities
• Enterprise Architecture certification preferred
• Insurance or risk management industry experience a plus