VP, Architecture

About the role

The Role JD Power is seeking a senior technology leader to serve as Vice President of Architecture, responsible for defining and governing the enterprise technical architecture across the company’s entire engineering organization.

Responsibilities

• Arcitectural Standards & NorthStar Principles
  • Own Enterprise Architecture: Consolidate the disparate architectural conventions of acquired entities into a single set of enterprise standards, reference architectures, and playbooks.
  • Define, publish, and maintain the NorthStar technical principles—covering front-end frameworks, back-end services, authentication, data platform, and CI/CD—and keep them current as technology evolves.
  • Lead enterprise-level technology choices (e.g., AI tooling, UI stack, CIAM, data platform) with clear rationale, and ensure consistent adoption across all engineering teams.
  • Promote shared component libraries, common patterns, and a consistent look, feel, and engineering experience across all JD Power products.
• Architecture Team & Guild Leadership
  • Build, mentor, and direct a small, high-caliber team of enterprise architects responsible for cross-cutting and enterprise-scope initiatives.
  • Lead the guild of architects embedded within engineering teams under the SVP of Engineering—setting their charter, raising their capability, and aligning their work to enterprise standards while preserving team autonomy.
  • Establish a federated (hybrid) governance model that balances local team ownership of system-level decisions with enterprise consistency on cross-cutting concerns.
  • Develop architecture talent, define career paths and expectations for architects across the organization, and grow the bench of senior technical leaders.
• Architecture Review & Governance
  • Design and run a two-tier architecture review process: product-specific reviews led by embedded architects, and enterprise-level reviews led by the enterprise architecture team.
  • Stand up and lead an architecture council—comprising enterprise, embedded, and TechOps architects—to evaluate initiatives of enterprise scope and resolve cross-cutting design decisions.
  • Integrate architecture review into the quarterly planning cadence, with clear triggers, standardized review artifacts, and a documented path for escalation from team-level to enterprise-level review.
  • Govern with transparency: Centralize architecture review artifacts and decisions (e.g., ADRs) so that rationale is transparent, discoverable, and reusable across the organization.
• Partnership & Influence
  • Partner closely with the SVP of Engineering, the VP of Infrastructure, TechOps, and Security to ensure architecture decisions are practical, secure, and operable.
  • Advise executive leadership with clear visibility into key architectural decisions, technical risk, and standards adoption across the engineering organization.
  • Influence engineering teams toward sound architecture through clarity, credibility, and collaboration rather than mandate alone.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of progressive experience in software engineering and technical architecture.
• 5+ years in a VP or Sr. Director architecture leadership role with responsibility for enterprise-wide standards.
• Demonstrated success leading and developing teams of architects, and influencing engineering organizations toward consistent standards.
• Deep, hands-on expertise across modern application architecture, including front-end frameworks (e.g., React), back-end services (e.g., Node.js, Java), and API design.
• Strong experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), data platforms (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake) and medallion/lakehouse data architecture.
• Experience selecting and standardizing enterprise capabilities such as authentication/CIAM (e.g., Auth0, SSO), CI/CD (e.g., GitLab) with DORA instrumentation, and AI/LLM tooling.
• Proven success establishing architecture review processes, governance councils, and decision frameworks (e.g., ADRs) in complex, multi-team environments.
• Track record of defining architecture in multi-entity or post-acquisition environments where consolidation and consistency are required.
• Solid experience with company and team transformation (especially with PE backed enterprises).
• Strong conviction about, and practical experience with, AI-assisted development tools and agentic engineering workflows.
• Exceptional communication and influence skills, with the ability to align engineering leaders and provide strategic counsel to the C-suite.
• Experience operating in private equity-backed or high-growth environments balancing growth with engineering efficiency.
• Experience in data-intensive or analytics-driven businesses, particularly automotive, financial services, or information services sectors (preferred).
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field; advanced degree preferred.

Benefits

The Role JD Power is a Thoma Bravo portfolio company that has grown from $300 million to approximately $900 million in revenue through ten strategic acquisitions since 2019. The largest engineering groups—Autodata Solutions, Autovista Group, and Superior Integrated Solutions / Darwin Automotive—were built on separate technology stacks, tooling, and architectural conventions. You will be responsible for establishing a unified, federated model of architectural governance that balances team autonomy with enterprise consistency.

Pay

This position has a starting salary range of $250,000 - $275,000 CAD/USD per year.

Schedule

The Role This role is remote – USA, Canada.