Technical Lead

About the role

The Technical Lead provides senior technical vision, architectural leadership, and delivery governance for TIAA’s business-critical software platforms. Under general direction, this role owns architectural decision-making, SDLC governance, and production support ownership for a complex, externally-facing platform, while mentoring engineering teams and setting the technical standards that guide platform scalability, security, and quality. This position serves as the senior-most technical authority within its platform area and is accountable for the platform’s long-term technical direction.

Responsibilities

• Owns the technical vision and architectural roadmap for the Insurance Solutions Technology platform, ensuring the platform can scale securely to support SIA product portability and future distribution partnerships
• Defines and governs API security standards, architectural decision-making processes, and SDLC quality gates across the platform
• Owns Level 3 production support strategy, ensuring the platform’s stability and resilience meet the demands of an externally-facing, partner-integrated system
• Provides senior technical mentorship and leadership to the broader engineering team, elevating the team’s collective technical capability
• Serves as the team’s primary authority on responsible AI adoption — defining governance, quality, and security guardrails for AI-assisted and AI-generated code
• Partners with business, product, and partner integration stakeholders to translate TIAA’s annuity market expansion strategy into a coherent, sustainable technical architecture
• Guides the platform’s technical evolution as TIAA’s annuity products expand into retail and future markets

Educational Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree Required

Work Experience

• 5 Years Required; 7 Years Preferred

Required Skills

• 5 or more years of experience with Java development (Java 17+), with demonstrated ownership of architecture and technical direction for enterprise platforms
• Demonstrated experience owning SDLC governance, architectural decision-making, and API security standards for a complex, externally-facing platform
• Proven ownership of Level 3 production support strategy for a business-critical, externally-facing system
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native engineering: AWS EKS, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, CloudBees, ArgoCD)
• Demonstrated ability to define governance frameworks and quality/security guardrails for AI-assisted development tools
• Exceptional track record of technical mentorship and leadership across engineering teams
• Experience translating business and platform strategy into technical architecture and execution roadmaps

Preferred Skills

• Financial services or insurance industry domain expertise, particularly annuity products, recordkeeping, or accumulation ledger systems
• Message-based integration architecture experience (IBM MQ, Apache ActiveMQ Artemis, Kafka, or JMS)
• Broader cloud infrastructure architecture experience: AWS (ECS, S3, Glue, Lambda), OpenShift, Terraform
• Secrets management and authentication architecture (CyberArk Conjur, Kerberos, or equivalent)
• Experience guiding platform strategy in the context of external distribution partnerships or multi-partner integration models
• BPMN / workflow orchestration architecture (Flowable, Camunda, or similar)
• Experience operating in Agile/Scrum environments with accountability for cross-team technical alignment

Base Pay Range

$130,000/yr – $154,000/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, depending on the role, participation in an incentive program linked to performance (for example, annual discretionary incentive programs, non-annual sales incentive plans, or other non-annual incentive plans).