Director, Enterprise Architect, Portfolio Lead

Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan • Toronto, ON

4d • Hybrid

About The Position

This role is accountable for shaping portfolio-level architecture direction in support of Teachers' enterprise strategy. As a key architecture leader aligned to our Technology departments (Investment Technology, Investment Risk and Performance Technology, Member Services Technology, Corporate Technology, Technology Infrastructure, Enterprise Security, and Platform Engineering), this role translates enterprise strategy, principles, and standards into actionable portfolio architectures, reference models, and multi-year capability roadmaps. This is a unique opportunity to influence how technology enables our Business Technology (Investments, Member Services, Investment Risk and Reporting, Corporate) and Technology Services (Technology Infrastructure, Enterprise Security and Platform Engineering) functions. The role acts as a strategic partner to the Business Technology / Technology Services leadership team, ensuring that architecture decisions are coherent, modern, secure, and value driven. The role also contributes to the development of enterprise architecture standards, roadmaps, and target-state models, translating enterprise strategy, principles, and guidelines into portfolio-specific architectures, capability roadmaps, and reference models.

Requirements

• University degree or equivalent in Computer Systems, Engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years' experience in architecture or senior technology roles within complex enterprise environments.
• Demonstrated success creating target-state architectures, reference models, and multi-year capability roadmaps that secured funding and were delivered against.
• Experience supporting or leading architecture governance, solution architecture oversight, and strategic planning.
• Proven ownership of major platform decisions, including build-versus-buy, vendor selection and contract renewal positions, with options assessed and costed.
• Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders and simplify complex issues into business-aligned narratives.
• Deep understanding of technology architecture domains, including application, data, integration, cloud, infrastructure, security and resilience.
• Strong business and technical acumen for the assigned portfolio (investments, risk and performance, member experience, corporate functions, technology infrastructure, enterprise security or platform engineering).
• Knowledge of architectural governance, capability modelling, target-state design, and roadmap development.
• Understanding how AI and agentic delivery change architecture practice, including patterns, guardrails, verification and cost.
• Awareness of regulatory, fiduciary, cybersecurity, and operational risk considerations affecting financial services, including resilience, recovery and data residency obligations.
• Strong oral, written, and interpersonal communication skills, with the ability to simplify complex technical concepts into business outcome-focused narratives.

Nice To Haves

• Professional architecture certification (TOGAF, SAFe Architect, or equivalent) is an asset.
• Experience in financial services, pension, or another regulated industry is preferred.
• Candidates must be legally entitled to work in the country where this role is located.

Responsibilities

• Translate enterprise architecture strategy, principles, and north-star vision into portfolio-specific architectures and reference models, establishing the target architecture with its capability model and design principles.
• Develop and maintain portfolio capability maps and multi-year roadmaps aligned to business priorities, enterprise objectives, and technology modernization goals.
• Ensure the portfolio architecture reflects strong architectural discipline across integration, data, application, infrastructure, cloud, security, and resilience.
• Partner with Business Technology / Technology Services leaders to shape multi-year investment plans that align with architecture direction and enterprise outcomes, covering both build and run costs.
• Analyze strategic options and provide leadership recommendations, making the trade-offs, risks and cost of each option explicit.
• Identify and communicate systemic risks, modernization opportunities, and architectural debt with clear traceability to business risk and value levers.
• Provide strategic architecture advice during annual planning, quarterly business reviews, and major initiative intake.
• Prepare and present architectural assessments and recommendations to the Architecture Review Board (ARB), ensuring clarity of rationale, risks, options, and alignment to enterprise standards.
• Accountable for the design review before the build and the operational readiness review before go-live, covering monitoring, recovery, rollback, runbooks and accepted risk.
• Support solution architecture teams in project initiation and delivery, ensuring designs remain aligned to approved patterns, principles, and reference architectures.
• Contribute to evolving enterprise standards, technology patterns, and governance processes
• Provide steer to the business and engineering teams on adopting AI native engineering practices, advancing the delivery model to achieve efficiency and speed
• Define and socialize reusable portfolio reference architectures, capability models, and solution patterns to ensure consistency and reduce time-to-value, publishing them in machine-readable form so that delivery tooling and coding agents can apply them.
• Define how AI is applied across the portfolio's systems and its delivery and identify the business processes and opportunities suited to AI-first technology delivery
• Sequence the technology services foundation ensuring platform, data, security and architecture capabilities are made agent-ready first for consumption by business and engineering teams
• Identify emerging technologies relevant to the portfolio and incorporate them into models and roadmaps, while ensuring security, compliance, and responsible adoption.
• Own the simplification and modernization agenda for the portfolio, reducing platform and tool proliferation, unnecessary customization, and end-of-life technology, with simplification sequenced ahead of automation.
• Establish and maintain the technology currency position for the portfolio, including lifecycle status, obsolescence exposure, vendor dependency and key-person risk, with remediation prioritized by business impact.
• Define how architectural debt is identified, prioritized, and systematically reduced over time, improving platform stability, maintainability, and total cost of ownership.
• Ensure each ratified standard carries a clear rationalization outcome, identifying the applications, tools and infrastructure it retires and the associated run-cost benefit.
• Act as a trusted advisor to Business Technology / Technology Services leaders, simplifying complex architectural decisions into business-centric narratives.
• Support the Managing Director, Enterprise Architecture and Emerging Technology in driving architecture maturity, including metrics, stewardship forums, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Mentor solution architects and engineering leaders to elevate architectural thinking across the portfolio.
• The role leads through expertise, influence and governance across the solution architects, engineering leads and delivery partners in the assigned portfolio.
• The role contributes to talent development by coaching portfolio architects, reviewing architectural work, and supporting capability uplift initiatives.
• The role has material influence on multi-year investment decisions, enterprise platforms, and cross-functional design choices affecting the portfolio's cost, resilience and business value.
• The role exercises significant autonomy within its assigned portfolio and decides: The portfolio's target architecture, capability model and roadmap sequence.
• Which patterns apply to a solution, and whether a design conforms to them.
• Architectural exceptions within the portfolio, each with a named owner and an expiry date.
• Technology selection within approved enterprise standards.
• The following are escalated to the Managing Director, Enterprise Architecture and Emerging Technology, and the accountable owner: Changes to enterprise standards, and new patterns that affect other portfolios.
• Decisions that carry enterprise-wide impact or material risk.
• Disputes between portfolios that the architects cannot settle.
• Vendor selection and material commercial commitments.

Benefits

• Comprehensive employer paid benefits coverage
• Retirement income through a defined benefit pension plan
• The opportunity to invest back into the fund through our Deferred Incentive Program
• A flexible work environment combining in office collaboration and remote working
• Competitive time off
• Our Flexible Travel Program gives you the option to work abroad in another region/country for up to a month each year
• Employee discount programs including Edvantage and Perkopolis

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director