Distinguished Architect - Enterprise Stability & Resilience Engineering

Citizens•Johnston, RI

1d•$182,000 - $254,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Distinguished Architect for Enterprise Stability & Resilience Engineering is a senior technical leader responsible for defining and driving the enterprise architecture, engineering capabilities, standards, and strategies that enable resilient, reliable, secure, recoverable, and high-performing customer journeys across the organization. This role is fundamentally different from traditional enterprise, cloud, infrastructure, platform, or application architecture positions. The successful candidate must be capable of understanding business domains, customer behaviors, end-to-end customer journeys, and complex technology ecosystems to identify systemic risks and architect enterprise-wide resilience capabilities. The Distinguished Architect will partner closely with the Director of Enterprise Stability & Resilience Engineering to establish the future-state strategy, architecture, governance model, engineering controls, and automation capabilities required to improve operational resilience across the enterprise. The ideal candidate combines deep software engineering expertise, enterprise architecture leadership, business acumen, and systems thinking to create resilience-by-design, reliability-by-design, security-by-design, and recoverability-by-design capabilities that become embedded into the organization's engineering practices.

Requirements

15+ years of experience in software engineering, solution architecture, enterprise architecture, or large-scale technology leadership roles.
Demonstrated expertise across software engineering, architecture, delivery, and operational excellence.
Proven ability to design and influence large-scale enterprise technology ecosystems.
Strong understanding of distributed systems, APIs, integration architecture, event-driven architectures, middleware, data platforms, and enterprise application landscapes.
Experience designing highly available, fault-tolerant, resilient, and recoverable systems.
Deep understanding of business capability modeling and customer journey architecture.
Strong executive communication, influencing, and strategic leadership skills.
Exceptional systems-thinking capabilities with an ability to connect technology decisions to business outcomes and customer impact.

Nice To Haves

Financial services, banking, payments, or highly regulated industry experience.
Experience leading customer-journey-centric transformation initiatives.
Experience in resilience engineering, reliability engineering, performance engineering, operational resilience, disaster recovery, cyber recovery, and risk management.
Experience defining enterprise engineering standards, governance frameworks, and architecture maturity models.
Demonstrated ability to influence enterprise-wide engineering and architecture practices.
Experience creating engineering platforms, automated controls, and governance-by-design capabilities.

Responsibilities

Define the enterprise architecture vision and strategy for Stability, Resilience, Reliability, Recoverability, Security, and Performance Engineering.
Develop reference architectures, engineering standards, patterns, frameworks, and reusable capabilities that improve enterprise resilience.
Architect resilience capabilities across critical customer journeys, business functions, and technology ecosystems.
Identify systemic risks, architectural vulnerabilities, concentration risks, failure points, and operational dependencies across the enterprise.
Develop deep understanding of business domains, customer journeys, customer behaviors, and critical business capabilities.
Create end-to-end technology and business capability maps spanning channels, applications, APIs, middleware, data platforms, infrastructure, and third-party services.
Analyze customer journeys to identify failure scenarios, recovery gaps, resiliency weaknesses, and customer-impact risks.
Influence technology decisions through a customer-outcome and business-value perspective.
Establish enterprise-wide engineering principles for reliability, recoverability, fault tolerance, availability, scalability, and performance.
Define architectural patterns for disaster recovery, cyber recovery, workload resilience, service continuity, and operational readiness.
Partner with engineering teams to ensure resilience and reliability requirements are integrated into solution designs.
Drive engineering approaches that proactively prevent customer-impacting incidents.
Define and automate resilience and reliability controls within software delivery pipelines.
Establish architecture guardrails, governance-by-design practices, engineering scorecards, and automated stage-gate controls.
Reduce dependence on manual governance processes by embedding standards, controls, and policy enforcement directly into engineering workflows.
Design measurable resilience and reliability maturity frameworks across customer journeys and technology platforms.
Serve as the enterprise thought leader for resilience engineering and customer journey-centered architecture.
Influence senior executives, enterprise architects, engineers, and business leaders on resilience strategies and investment priorities.
Represent Stability & Resilience Engineering in Architecture Review Boards, executive forums, and strategic planning discussions.
Mentor architects and engineering leaders across the organization.