Vice President Senior Lead Architect

What you'll do

• Manage the end-to-end architecture governance process including intake, triage, artifact definition, and tracking items to closure.
• Plan and facilitate architecture review boards by managing agendas, pre-reads, minutes, and follow-up actions.
• Maintain a clean, auditable record of Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) to ensure decisions are traceable and reusable.
• Develop and improve architecture standards, guardrails, reference architectures, and non-functional requirement checklists.
• Manage exception and waiver workflows by tracking rationale, approvals, and remediation plans for systemic improvements.
• Review architecture submissions for completeness regarding NFRs, dependencies, resiliency, security, and data considerations.
• Provide status reports and metrics on governance throughput, including volume, cycle time, and common exception themes.
• Utilize enterprise-authorized AI capabilities to accelerate architecture analysis and governance workflows with human-in-the-loop validation.

What we're looking for

• Formal training or certification on architecture concepts and 5+ years of applied experience.
• Experience in architecture governance and operations within a complex technology organization.
• Proficiency with architecture artifacts including target state architecture, NFRs, integration patterns, and ADRs.
• Ability to influence stakeholders and drive decisions without formal authority.
• Excellent stakeholder management, facilitation, and executive-ready communication skills.
• Strong organizational rigor to manage backlogs, actions, and traceability across concurrent workstreams.
• Experience applying enterprise-authorized AI capabilities within architecture workflows with proper data sensitivity awareness.
• Tooling familiarity including Jira, Confluence, or similar tools to build dashboards and metrics.
• Prior hands-on experience in solution, enterprise, or platform architecture (preferred).
• Background in payments, merchant services, or regulated financial services (preferred).
• Familiarity with risk, compliance, and control frameworks (preferred).
• Experience building or maturing architecture governance programs in large organizations (preferred).