Chief Wealth Platform Architect

Vanguard•Malvern, PA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Chief Wealth Platform Architect for Advice & Wealth Management shapes and evolves the end-to-end platform architecture that supports wealth managers in growing their book and delivering exceptional products and services to clients and their households. The platform must seamlessly integrate the full suite of tools and services into a cohesive, scalable, and flexible ecosystem. Partnering closely with business, product, and engineering teams, the Chief Wealth Platform Architect provides architectural leadership to select and integrate third-party solutions as well as building bespoke capabilities into a unified platform experience.

Requirements

Deep experience in wealth management platforms (financial planning, portfolio construction, portfolio management).
Strong understanding of advisor workflows and client service models.
Expertise in multi-vendor ecosystem integration and platform composition.
Proven ability to design scalable, secure, and flexible platform architectures.
Knowledge of industry platforms, CRM systems, and advisor desktop ecosystems.
Experience balancing buy vs build vs integrate decisions in complex environments.
Ability to influence senior stakeholders and align across business and technology.

Responsibilities

Define and execute the wealth platform architecture roadmap for Advice & Wealth Management (Portfolio of the Future initiatives).
Lead overall Platform Strategy inclusive of the down-market vision and overlap of capabilities and solutions.
Establish integration patterns across multiple third-party vendors and internal systems.
Define architecture principles to ensure platform solutions are secure, scalable, and adaptable to change.
Shape the strategy for the advisor desktop and client experience platform.
Develop approaches for composing capabilities across tools into a unified experience (vs fragmented point solutions).
Maintain deep understanding of the wealth management vendor landscape and how capabilities fit together.
Identify reuse opportunities and tradeoffs.
Influence platform investment decisions and vendor strategy based on architectural direction.
Guide teams on designing solutions that balance flexibility, configurability, and standardization.
Coach and mentor architects and senior engineers on platform architecture practices.
Defining the target-state advisor platform architecture (advisor desktop + client experience).
Integrating financial planning, portfolio construction, and portfolio management capabilities.
Establishing integration patterns for vendors and third-party tools.
Developing a point of view on CRM and advisor desktop platforms.
Driving platform simplification and consolidation where appropriate.
Designing architectures that support growth, M&A, and evolving advisor needs.
Partnering with Data Architecture to ensure vendors adhere to VG data standards & canonical data modeling strategy.
Maintaining strong vendor relationships to be able to influence their direction / roadmap to meet the needs of Advice & Wealth Management.