Our vision for the future is based on the idea that transforming financial lives starts by giving our people the freedom to transform their own. We have a flexible work environment, and fluid career paths. We not only encourage but celebrate internal mobility. We also recognize the importance of purpose, well-being, and work-life balance. Within Empower and our communities, we work hard to create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and our associates dedicate thousands of hours to volunteering for causes that matter most to them.
Chart your own path and grow your career while helping more customers achieve financial freedom. Empower Yourself.
The Enterprise Architect, Application Architecture will play a critical leadership role in shaping and advancing Empower’s application architecture strategy. This individual will operate at the intersection of business strategy and deep technical execution, defining the application architecture vision, guiding engineering teams toward modern architecture patterns, and influencing the broader organization to adopt sound architectural principles and best practices.
This role requires a highly technical architect who can lead through expertise, credibility, and collaboration. The ideal candidate will drive architecture standards across the enterprise, establish practical guidance for delivery teams, and ensure application platforms and solutions are scalable, secure, resilient, maintainable, and aligned to business priorities.
A key responsibility of this role is leading the Application Architecture Guild, which is responsible for defining and advancing application architecture standards, principles, patterns, best practices, reference architectures, quick starts, and implementation guidance across Empower. This leader will partner closely with Engineering, Infrastructure, Security, Product, Delivery, PMO, Data, and business leaders to improve architectural maturity and enable consistent, high-quality solution delivery.
The ideal candidate is comfortable working in a fast-paced environment, navigating ambiguity, influencing across organizational boundaries, and balancing strategic thinking with hands-on technical leadership.
Responsibilities
- Define, evolve, and communicate Empower’s application architecture strategy, principles, standards, and roadmap in alignment with enterprise priorities and business goals.
- Lead the Application Architecture Guild and drive adoption of architecture standards, best practices, reusable patterns, reference implementations, quick starts, and engineering guardrails.
- Provide technical leadership for modern application architecture, including cloud-native, distributed, event-driven, API-first, and domain-aligned architectures.
- Guide engineering and product teams in designing scalable, secure, resilient, observable, and maintainable applications and services.
- Partner with business, product, engineering, security, infrastructure, and delivery leaders to align architecture decisions with business outcomes, risk requirements, and operational needs.
- Establish and govern application architecture principles covering areas such as integration, service design, data flow, resiliency, performance, security, observability, and platform usage.
- Lead architecture reviews and decision-making forums, clearly articulating trade-offs, risks, dependencies, and recommendations.
- Influence teams across the organization to adopt target-state architecture patterns and engineering best practices through education, coaching, and practical enablement.
- Create and maintain reference architectures, architecture playbooks, standards documentation, and reusable implementation assets.
- Drive consistency in architecture decisions across portfolios while enabling appropriate flexibility for product and domain-specific needs.
- Evaluate emerging technologies, tools, and frameworks for applicability to Empower’s application landscape and recommend pragmatic adoption paths.
- Collaborate with enterprise architecture peers to ensure application architecture aligns with broader enterprise, data, security, and infrastructure strategies.
- Support modernization initiatives, including legacy rationalization, application decomposition, cloud adoption, integration modernization, and platform optimization.
- Champion architecture practices that improve developer experience, speed to market, operational excellence, and long-term maintainability.
- Provide thought leadership, advocacy, assurance, and continuous improvement for the application architecture discipline across the enterprise.
Required Qualifications
- 15+ years of experience in software engineering, systems development, and technology delivery, including significant experience designing and evolving enterprise-scale applications.
- 7+ years of experience in architecture roles with deep hands-on expertise in application and solution architecture across multiple technology domains.
- Proven experience defining and implementing application architecture standards, patterns, and governance in a large, complex organization.
- Strong expertise in modern architecture approaches, including:
- cloud-native and distributed systems
- microservices and service-oriented architectures
- API-first and event-driven integration patterns
- application modernization and decomposition strategies
- domain-driven design and scalable service design
- Deep understanding of cross-cutting architectural concerns such as security, identity, resiliency, performance, caching, observability, scalability, availability, and operational supportability.
- Strong experience with modern integration patterns and technologies, including APIs, messaging, RESTful services, asynchronous architectures, and API management platforms.
- Experience working closely with DevOps and platform engineering practices, including CI/CD, infrastructure automation, testing strategies, and production operations.
- Demonstrated ability to influence senior leaders, engineers, and delivery teams to adopt architectural best practices and strategic technology direction.
- Strong communication skills with the ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear, business-relevant language.
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in financial services or other highly regulated industries.
- Strong understanding of digital transformation, enterprise modernization, and cloud migration strategies.
- Experience with architecture governance processes, architecture review boards, and operating models that balance control with delivery speed.
- Familiarity with data-intensive applications, advanced analytics, AI/ML-enabled solutions, and modern data integration patterns.
- Experience creating reference architectures, engineering standards, reusable frameworks, and self-service architecture enablement assets.
- Knowledge of business process automation, workflow platforms, and enterprise integration ecosystems.
- Experience mentoring architects and senior engineers and building architecture communities of practice or guilds.
Leadership and Success Profile
Technology depth alone is not enough for this role. The successful Enterprise Architect will also bring strong leadership and interpersonal capabilities, including:
- Influence and Evangelism – Able to build alignment and drive adoption of architectural principles and best practices across teams and leaders.
- People Skills – Builds strong relationships and collaborates effectively across business and technology organizations.
- Motivational Leadership – Inspires teams and stakeholders around a clear architectural vision and practical path forward.
- Negotiation – Effectively navigates trade-offs, priorities, and competing viewpoints to reach sound decisions.
- Problem Solving – Able to analyze complex technical and organizational problems and develop pragmatic, scalable solutions.
- Strategic Thinking – Sees the big picture, avoids tunnel vision, and connects architecture decisions to long-term business and technology outcomes.
- Business Savvy – Understands how technology choices affect business performance, risk, cost, customer experience, and operational effectiveness.
- Adaptability – Thrives in dynamic environments and can lead effectively through ambiguity and change.
We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to diversity. All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, pregnancy, religion, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable state or local law.
