Director, Enterprise Architecture

GreatAmerica Financial Services • Cedar Rapids, IA

6d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Director, Enterprise Architecture serves as the end‑to‑end solution architecture authority for the enterprise and provides strategic and hands‑on leadership for the Solution Architecture function. This role leads and manages a team of Solution Architects while overseeing the design and delivery of scalable, reusable, and secure technology solutions across GreatAmerica’s products and platforms. This leader is responsible for connecting product‑level and platform‑level solutions into a cohesive enterprise architecture, ensuring consistency, integration, and reuse across domains. The role engages across the full solution lifecycle from ideation and evaluation through implementation and ongoing optimization, partnering closely with product teams, platform teams, and technology leadership. The Director, Enterprise Architecture works collaboratively with solution architects, technical leaders, business systems analysts, engineers, security, infrastructure, and external partners to ensure solutions align with business outcomes, architectural standards, and long‑term strategy. In addition, this role provides guidance to business and technology leaders on critical investment and trade‑off decisions, balancing near‑term operational needs with the organization’s future‑state vision. This position plays a key role in shaping and translating GreatAmerica’s strategic vision into executable technology and business capabilities, enabling alignment across business, product, and platform teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, management information systems, computer engineering, system analysis, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• 10+ years of experience in architecting complex solutions, with 5+ of those years using Salesforce technologies, Integration patterns and relevant industry SaaS solutions.
• 3 years of experience implementing using Agile and Scrum methods in a product-oriented organization at enterprise scale.
• Demonstrated experience working with product owners, software, security engineers, data architects, application developers & data scientists to plan enterprise solutions.
• Develop and document enterprise reference architecture designs.
• An ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Hands on understanding of Cloud platforms, DevOps, integrations, and event‑driven architectures
• Solid understanding of Data architecture and platform ecosystems, working closely with enterprise data leadership
• Making trade‑off decisions between speed, cost, risk, and long‑term sustainability
• Fluency in Scaled Agile (SAFe) architecture practices, including architecture runway, enablers, and PI planning integration
• Strong knowledge of Salesforce architecture principles, patterns, practices, and tools and the salesforce ecosystem with full-stack experience and capabilities.
• Working knowledge of event driven architecture.
• Experience in working in regulated environments
• Experience architecting/optimizing applications for Azure with an emphasis on performance and reliability.
• Knowledge of applicable data privacy practices and information security practices.
• A solid understanding of technologies such as APIs, Data, Attributes
• Proven ability to architect innovative enterprise solutions using existing capabilities or by acquiring/building new capabilities.
• Invests time to educate self on emerging technologies and techniques to foster an innovative approach to solution engineering.
• Continues learning and adapting to change by being receptive to coaching to address gaps and proactively develop desired proficiencies for themselves and their team.
• Passion for technology solutions that drive business success for GreatAmerica.
• Proven ability to understand an organization’s goals and objectives.
• Ability to effectively prioritize and execute tasks in a high-pressure environment.
• Ability to understand complicated business requirements and facilitate internal discussions to create conceptual solutions and high-level sizing estimates.
• Experience at working both independently and in a team-oriented, collaborative environment.
• Persuasive, encouraging, and diplomatic.
• Cultivates relationships and interactions with GreatAmerica’s leaders and key influencers.
• Ability to elicit cooperation from a wide variety of stakeholders, vendors, service providers and peers.
• A passion for innovation and creativity in solving challenging problems.
• Strong written and oral communication skills.
• Adept at conducting research into product and service-related issues.
• Must be able to learn, understand, and apply new technologies rapidly.
• Willingness to travel to industry events as well as customer visits and attend events that cultivate relationships (e.g. Trade shows, conferences, etc.).

Nice To Haves

• Passionately communication skills with a strong aptitude for creating compelling visuals and persuasive written content for internal and external consumption.

Responsibilities

• Research and evaluate new technologies, frameworks, tools, and best practices to improve the quality and efficiency of the technology solutions.
• Foster a test and learn mentality and processes to innovate through proof-of-concept and prototype delivery, enabling the engineering teams to deliver innovative solutions quickly.
• Architect high-quality software applications and data solutions using various products, services, and platforms, such as Salesforce, Azure, API third party and in-house built software, InfoLease and Databricks.
• Create and maintain the architecture artifacts, including architecture reference diagrams and architecture pattens.
• Collaborate with other solution architects and engineers to ensure alignment and integration of the solutions across different products and business domains.
• Partner with engineers in solving issues through scalable solution architecture and patterns, ensuring optimal performance, security and availability.
• Identify and drive aggressive reduction of technical debt.
• Own application rationalization process to significantly reduce number of applications.
• Lead, mentor and coach a team of Solution Architects.
• Provide overall direction, guidance, and definition of technology architectures across the product release train).
• Develop business and technology architecture standards, procedures, and policy in conjunction the other solution architects and engineers.
• Lead the enterprise architecture review board and ensure that the solutions are compliant with target-state architecture models, security, risk, compliance and innovative techniques.
• Assist in new product and vendor evaluations, proof-of-concept and prototypes.
• Architect cloud based, application/product architectures with reusable patterns like microservices and event driven techniques.
• Align architecture strategy with business goals.
• Consult with product/platform teams to fit solution designs to enterprise architecture, as well as to identify when it is necessary to modify the enterprise architecture.
• Conduct research and evaluation of emerging technology, industry, and market trends.
• Lead the refactoring of applications for cloud deployment and building cloud native applications.
• Work on highly complex solution architecture that requires in-depth knowledge across multiple specialized domains.
• Collaborate with product management, business architecture and engineering leaders to ensure progress towards architectural alignment with product goals and requirements.
• Participate in budget processes to ensure objectives are achieved within fiscal expectations.
• Frame architecture decisions in business risk, business value, and delivery impact
• Act as a steady advisor to the CTO and platform leadership, especially in moments of trade‑off or escalation.

Benefits

• Competitive Compensation
• Monthly Bonuses for Eligible Employees
• 401(k) and Company Match
• Annual Profit Sharing
• Paid Vacation - starting at 80 hours annually for employees in their first year of service.
• Paid Sick Days - Ten (10) per year with a conversion option for unused time.
• Ten (10) Paid Holidays per year
• Gym Reimbursement
• Health Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Short-Term and Long Term Disability
• Company Paid Life Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)
• Health Savings Accounts (HSA)
• Employee Assistance Program
• Parental Leave
• Tuition Assistance
• Networking Opportunities
• Leadership Development Opportunities
• Paid Parking
• Service Awards
• Hybrid work arrangements
• Business casual environment

What This Job Offers

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