FC Global Services India LLP (First Citizens India), a part of First Citizens BancShares, Inc., a top 20 U.S. financial institution, is a global capability center (GCC) based in Bengaluru. Our India-based teams benefit from the company’s over 125-year legacy of strength and stability. First Citizens India is responsible for delivering value and managing risks for our lines of business. We are particularly proud of our strong, relationship-driven culture and our long-term approach, which are deeply ingrained in our talented workforce. This is evident across all key areas of our operations, including Technology, Enterprise Operations, Finance, Cybersecurity, Risk Management, and Credit Administration. We are seeking talented individuals to join us in our mission of providing solutions fit for our clients’ greatest ambitions.

Job Description:

Value Proposition:

Executive-level influence, distinguished technical authority, hands-on delivery engagement. The role is expected to move fluidly from enterprise strategy and executive discussion to architecture models, policy controls, engineering artifacts, AI evaluations, and deep technical problem solving

Focus on Enterprise-Wide Influence: Shape enterprise technology direction and influence strategic investments across the organization. 

Focus on AI-Powered Innovation & Transformation: Build agentic AI-driven governance capabilities embedded into engineering workflows. 

Job Details

Position Title: Director Enterprise Architect 

Career Level: P6 

Job Category: Director

Job Location: Bangalore 

Role Type: Hybrid 

About the Team:

Enterprise Architecture establishes standards, target-state roadmaps, governance practices, and modernization strategies across the enterprise. 

Impact:

The Senior Principal Enterprise Architect is one of the organization’s foremost technology authorities, combining enterprise-level influence with deep, hands-on technical leadership. The role shapes enterprise technology strategy, architecture direction, governance, cybersecurity posture, resilience, and adoption of emerging technologies while remaining close enough to delivery to inspect designs, challenge implementation choices, codify controls, and work directly with engineers and architects on complex problems.

A defining mandate is to evolve architecture governance from periodic, document-centric review toward continuous, risk-based assurance embedded in engineering workflows. The Senior Principal Architect translates enterprise principles, standards, security requirements, resilience expectations, and reference patterns into machine-evaluable controls where appropriate, including policy-as-code, governance-as-code, architecture decision records, pipeline gates, automated evidence collection, and AI-assisted review.

The role also pioneers pragmatic use of Frontier AI, Agentic AI, and autonomous decision-support capabilities for architecture, cybersecurity, software engineering, code interrogation, and technology governance. It is accountable for ensuring that emerging technologies move from experimentation to governed enterprise capability with clear guardrails, traceability, human oversight, measurable value, and controlled risk.

This is not a purely advisory position. The successful candidate operates effectively from the boardroom to the engineering workbench: advising executives on strategic trade-offs, mentoring senior architects, reviewing complex designs and code/IaC evidence, shaping reference implementations, partnering with cybersecurity and platform teams, and intervening directly when material architectural risk or delivery complexity requires expert leadership.

Key Deliverables:

Enterprise Technology Strategy & Architecture Leadership

• Define and evolve the enterprise architecture vision, principles, target-state architectures, reference architectures, technology north stars, and multi-year modernization roadmaps.
• Serve as a recognized authority across business, application, data, integration, cloud, infrastructure, platform, cybersecurity, resilience, and AI architecture.
• Advise CIO, CISO, CTO, CDO, CRO, business executives, and investment forums on technology strategy, modernization sequencing, platform choices, sourcing, risk, and architectural trade-offs.
• Shape enterprise-wide decisions by translating complex technology options into business outcomes, cost, risk, resilience, delivery implications, and actionable decision paths.
• Identify structural technology risks and opportunities across portfolios, including legacy concentration, platform fragmentation, vendor dependency, security exposure, technology debt, and architectural drift.

Architecture Governance, Continuous Conformance & Engineering Enablement

• Design and operate a risk-based architecture governance model that applies the right level of review and control based on business criticality, technology risk, change materiality, and regulatory impact.
• Establish clear decision rights and an architecture hierarchy spanning principles, standards, reference patterns, strategic and domain decisions, Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), exceptions, and technical-debt acceptance.
• Move repeatable architecture and control checks into delivery workflows through policy-as-code, governance-as-code, automated evidence collection, CI/CD integration, and continuous conformance.
• Codify approved security, resilience, cloud, data, integration, software-engineering, and platform requirements into machine-evaluable controls where deterministic enforcement is appropriate.
• Create golden paths and paved-road patterns that make the compliant architecture the easiest path for engineering teams to adopt.
• Detect and address architectural drift, design anti-patterns, unsupported technology, control gaps, non-conformance, and accumulating technical debt before they become production risk.
• Define exception and waiver mechanisms with explicit ownership, compensating controls, expiration, remediation commitments, and risk acceptance.
• Measure architecture governance by business and engineering outcomes, not review volume alone, including decision velocity, conformance, defect prevention, risk reduction, reuse, modernization progress, and developer experience.

Cybersecurity Architecture & Secure-by-Design Leadership

• Partner with cybersecurity leadership to embed secure-by-design principles across enterprise architecture, platform engineering, cloud, software delivery, data, identity, APIs, third-party integration, and AI-enabled systems.
• Establish architecture patterns and guardrails for Zero Trust, identity and access management, secrets, encryption, segmentation, API security, software supply-chain security, data protection, and privileged access.
• Integrate threat modeling, abuse-case analysis, security architecture review, SAST/SCA/DAST findings, IaC scanning, SBOM intelligence, and runtime signals into architecture decisions and engineering workflows.
• Drive architectural approaches that reduce attack surface and systemic risk through isolation, least privilege, dependency control, blast-radius reduction, secure defaults, and defense in depth.
• Work directly with security and engineering teams on high-risk designs, material vulnerabilities, complex remediation strategies, and control exceptions when expert technical intervention is required.

Enterprise Resilience & Operational Risk Architecture

• Define enterprise resilience architecture and minimum design expectations for availability, recoverability, fault tolerance, business continuity, graceful degradation, capacity, and operational sustainability.
• Establish patterns for redundancy, fault isolation, circuit breaking, bulkheads, idempotency, timeout and retry control, dependency decoupling, multi-region operation, data recovery, and controlled failover.
• Develop mechanisms to identify single points of failure, dependency concentration, recovery gaps, correlated failure modes, and excessive blast radius across critical business services.
• Integrate resilience requirements and validation into architecture reviews, engineering pipelines, test strategies, observability, incident management, and production-readiness processes.
• Use operational telemetry, incident patterns, SLO breaches, post-incident findings, and recovery-test outcomes to continuously improve architecture standards and risk models.

Frontier AI, Agentic AI & Autonomous Architecture Review

• Lead enterprise architecture for Frontier AI, generative AI, Agentic AI, autonomous workflows, multi-agent systems, and AI-assisted software engineering, balancing innovation velocity with safety, control, and measurable value.
• Design AI-assisted architecture review capabilities that evaluate solution designs, architecture artifacts, source code, infrastructure-as-code, pipeline evidence, runbooks, ADRs, and operational context against enterprise standards.
• Develop intelligent governance agents that can reason across architecture, security, resilience, data, platform, and engineering domains; identify risk and non-conformance; explain findings; and recommend remediation.
• Define the control plane for enterprise AI agents, including identity, authorization, tool access, memory, enterprise context, data boundaries, observability, model routing, evaluation, human approval, rollback, and auditability.
• Establish guardrails for autonomous action, including registration and traceability of agents, least-privilege tool use, human approval for material or irreversible actions, deterministic control gates, and controlled escalation.
• Implement evaluation frameworks for AI-assisted architecture capabilities using measures such as task success, finding quality, false-positive rate, override rate, policy violations, review-cycle reduction, latency, cost per outcome, and AI incidents.
• Separate deterministic enforcement from probabilistic AI reasoning: use policy engines for hard controls and AI for interpretation, context synthesis, risk reasoning, recommendation, and complex review.

Emerging Technology & Innovation Leadership

• Continuously assess emerging technologies, frontier models, cloud and platform capabilities, security innovations, developer tooling, data technologies, and new architectural patterns for enterprise relevance.
• Translate market signals and technology trends into clear enterprise implications: where to invest, experiment, standardize, partner, defer, or explicitly avoid.
• Design governed experimentation and innovation-lab approaches with hypotheses, success criteria, security controls, architecture guardrails, cost boundaries, and defined paths from proof-of-concept to production.
• Create technology option assessments and executive recommendations that distinguish genuine strategic advantage from novelty, lock-in, hidden operational cost, or unmanaged risk.
• Contribute to external thought leadership, architecture communities, industry forums, standards bodies, or technology partnerships where strategically valuable.

Hands-On Technical Leadership

• Personally engage in the most complex architecture problems rather than operating only through governance forums or delegated review.
• Review and challenge solution architectures, sequence diagrams, data flows, threat models, integration contracts, cloud designs, deployment topologies, resilience models, architecture decision records, code-level evidence, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Create or refine reference implementations, reusable patterns, policy rules, architecture tests, engineering guidance, proof-of-concepts, and technical decision artifacts when needed to unblock or de-risk delivery.
• Partner directly with platform, cybersecurity, SRE, data, cloud, application, and developer-experience teams to turn architecture intent into implementable engineering standards.
• Lead deep technical problem-solving sessions for material production risks, cross-domain design issues, modernization barriers, and emerging technology adoption.
• Maintain sufficient depth in modern software engineering, cloud platforms, AI systems, APIs/eventing, DevSecOps, and security architecture to independently validate technical claims and implementation feasibility.

Executive Influence, Talent & Architecture Community

• Translate architecture decisions into executive-level narratives covering business value, risk exposure, investment implications, delivery impact, and strategic optionality.
• Build consensus across business, product, engineering, cybersecurity, operations, data, risk, finance, and vendor stakeholders in highly matrixed environments.
• Mentor principal and senior architects, engineering leaders, and technical fellows; raise architecture maturity through coaching, reusable methods, and direct technical challenge.
• Act as an escalation point for high-impact architecture decisions and material exceptions while fostering a culture of engineering ownership rather than centralized compliance.
• Represent architecture in strategic planning, investment governance, major transformation programs, regulatory or audit discussions, and executive technology forums.

• 15+ years of progressive technology and architecture experience, including substantial leadership of enterprise or domain architecture in large, complex organizations.
• Demonstrated ability to define enterprise technology strategy and influence executive-level decisions across business and technology stakeholders.
• Deep expertise in architecture governance, architecture decision-making, reference architectures, standards, patterns, ADRs, risk-based review, and continuous conformance.
• Strong cybersecurity architecture background spanning identity, cloud security, application security, data protection, software supply chain, Zero Trust, threat modeling, and secure-by-design engineering.
• Deep understanding of operational resilience, distributed systems, high availability, disaster recovery, fault isolation, dependency risk, observability, and production-readiness practices.
• Hands-on experience with modern cloud and engineering ecosystems, including APIs, event-driven architecture, containers, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, DevSecOps, policy engines, and developer platforms.
• Practical experience with generative AI, Frontier AI, LLM-powered systems, Agentic AI, AI orchestration, RAG/enterprise context, tool use, evaluation, observability, and Responsible AI controls.
• Experience translating architecture and security requirements into automated or machine-evaluable controls such as policy-as-code, architecture tests, pipeline rules, or governance automation.
• Ability to independently review technical designs and implementation evidence and work directly with engineering teams at sufficient depth to resolve complex technical issues.
• Exceptional executive communication, structured problem solving, stakeholder management, and ability to operate effectively without relying on formal authority.

• Experience in financial services, banking, insurance, payments, or another highly regulated enterprise environment.
• Experience establishing or modernizing enterprise architecture governance, platform engineering, developer experience, or architecture assurance capabilities.
• Experience implementing AI-assisted architecture review, code interrogation, vulnerability triage/remediation, or autonomous governance workflows.
• Practical experience with OPA/Rego or comparable policy engines, GitLab/GitHub/Azure DevOps CI/CD ecosystems, SAST/SCA/DAST/IaC tooling, and enterprise observability platforms.
• Experience with technology rationalization, platform consolidation, post-merger integration, or modernization of large application estates.
• Contributions to architecture communities, publications, patents, open-source projects, industry forums, or internal technical fellowship programs.
• Relevant architecture, cloud, cybersecurity, AI, or engineering certifications such as TOGAF, AWS/Azure/GCP, CISSP, SABSA, or equivalent experience.

• Architecture is recognized as a strategic engineering capability that improves business outcomes, technology investment decisions, delivery quality, and risk posture.
• Governance shifts from episodic review toward continuous, risk-based assurance embedded in delivery and platform workflows.
• Architecture standards, cybersecurity controls, and resilience requirements are increasingly measurable, auditable, machine-evaluable, and continuously enforced where appropriate.
• High-risk design defects, architectural drift, security weaknesses, resilience gaps, and single points of failure are identified earlier—before they reach production.
• Engineering teams have clear golden paths, reusable patterns, automated controls, and actionable guidance that reduce review friction rather than adding bureaucracy.
• Frontier AI and Agentic AI capabilities demonstrate measurable value while operating within explicit guardrails for identity, data, tool access, traceability, human oversight, evaluation, and rollback.
• Executive leaders consistently rely on architecture insights to make strategic technology, cyber-risk, modernization, sourcing, and investment decisions.
• The architecture community becomes technically stronger, more outcome-oriented, and more embedded in engineering execution while preserving independent challenge on material risk.

Relationships & Collaboration

• Reports to: Senior Director
• Partners: Tech leadership, ARG, SLT
• Leads: Enterprise Architecture

Accessibility Needs

We are committed to providing an inclusive and accessible hiring process. If you require accommodation at any stage (e.g. application, interviews, onboarding) please let us know, and we will work with you to ensure a seamless experience.

Equal Employment Opportunity

FC Global Services India LLP (First Citizens India) is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive and accessible environment and prohibit all forms of discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, caste, disability, sexual orientation, economic status or any other characteristics protected by the law. We strive to foster a safe and respectful environment in which all individuals are treated with respect and dignity. Our EEO policy ensures fairness throughout the employee life cycle.