Enterprise Architect

Empower • Overland Park, KS

4d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Enterprise Architect will play a strategic leadership role within Empower’s Business Architecture organization, partnering with business and technology leaders to align technology strategy, enterprise roadmaps, and solution direction with business priorities. This role will translate business objectives into actionable architecture strategies, identify capability gaps and modernization opportunities, and guide technology decisions that improve client experience, operational efficiency, resiliency, scalability, and long-term business value. The initial focus of this role may include Empower’s Workplace Solutions business, which supports employer-sponsored retirement plans, plan sponsors, participants, and related products and services. The successful candidate may also support other enterprise domains or cross-enterprise capabilities based on business need and individual experience. The ideal candidate brings strong enterprise architecture experience, business acumen, and the ability to engage credibly with both senior business executives and technology leaders. This individual must be comfortable navigating ambiguity, influencing across organizational boundaries, and connecting strategic business outcomes to practical technology roadmaps.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 15+ years of experience in technology delivery, enterprise architecture, solution architecture, business architecture, technology strategy, or related disciplines.
• 7+ years of experience creating architecture strategies and roadmaps across multiple architecture domains, such as business, application, data, integration, infrastructure, security, and cloud.
• Strong experience partnering with senior business and technology leaders to translate strategy into architecture direction, investment priorities, and execution roadmaps.
• Experience developing current-state and target-state architecture views, business capability models, value streams, application roadmaps, integration maps, and transformation plans.
• Strong understanding of modern architecture approaches, including service-oriented architecture, microservices, API-first design, event-driven architecture, cloud-native platforms, SaaS/PaaS/IaaS models, and domain-aligned architecture.
• Experience with application modernization, legacy platform rationalization, cloud migration, data integration, workflow automation, and enterprise platform simplification.
• Strong knowledge of integration patterns and technologies, including APIs, messaging, RESTful services, event streaming, file-based integrations, and API management platforms.
• Ability to evaluate complex technology landscapes and identify opportunities to reduce risk, improve speed to market, strengthen resiliency, simplify operations, and reduce total cost of ownership.
• Strong understanding of cross-cutting architecture concerns, including security, privacy, identity, data quality, resiliency, performance, scalability, availability, observability, operational supportability, and regulatory risk.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear business-relevant language.
• Strong facilitation, negotiation, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in financial services, retirement services, wealth management, benefits administration, insurance, banking, or another highly regulated industry.
• Experience supporting business or technology capabilities related to employer retirement plans, direct-to-investor wealth offerings, shared services, digital experiences, servicing, operations, data platforms, or enterprise transformation.
• Familiarity with retirement plan concepts, plan sponsor and participant experiences, wealth management platforms, customer servicing models, regulatory obligations, or financial services operations.
• Experience working with vendor platforms, third-party service providers, outsourced capabilities, or strategic technology partners.
• Experience with architecture governance, portfolio planning, business capability modeling, domain roadmaps, and enterprise transformation planning.
• Experience building or maturing Enterprise Architecture, Business Architecture, or architecture communities of practice.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a true business-aligned Enterprise Architect, not only as a technical architect.

Responsibilities

• Partner with business and technology leaders to understand business strategy, growth priorities, operational challenges, market trends, and technology needs.
• Translate business strategy into enterprise architecture direction, capability roadmaps, target-state architecture, and actionable transformation plans.
• Develop and maintain architecture views across business capabilities, applications, platforms, data flows, integrations, value streams, and key dependencies.
• Provide architecture leadership across one or more business domains or enterprise-wide capabilities.
• Identify opportunities to simplify the technology landscape, reduce duplication, modernize legacy capabilities, improve resiliency, optimize cost, and better align platforms to business capabilities.
• Influence technology investment decisions by clearly articulating architecture trade-offs, risks, dependencies, sequencing considerations, and target-state alignment.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Operations, Data, Security, Infrastructure, Cloud, Legal, Compliance, Finance, and Architecture peers to ensure business and technology strategies are aligned.
• Support portfolio planning and prioritization by connecting business capabilities, technology roadmaps, operational impacts, and enterprise strategy.
• Create reference architectures, architecture principles, decision frameworks, and roadmap guidance that support consistent, scalable, secure, and maintainable solution delivery.
• Evaluate new business initiatives, vendor capabilities, platform options, and emerging technologies to help shape pragmatic recommendations and business cases.
• Guide modernization initiatives, including application rationalization, cloud adoption, platform simplification, integration modernization, data enablement, and workflow automation.
• Participate in architecture reviews and decision forums, communicating recommendations clearly to business and technical audiences.
• Coach and influence teams on architecture principles, business capability thinking, enterprise standards, and strategic roadmap alignment.
• Provide thought leadership, advocacy, assurance, and continuous improvement for the Enterprise Architecture and Business Architecture disciplines.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision and life insurance
• Retirement savings – 401(k) plan with generous company matching contributions (up to 6%), financial advisory services, potential company discretionary contribution, and a broad investment lineup
• Tuition reimbursement up to $5,250/year
• Business-casual environment that includes the option to wear jeans
• Generous paid time off upon hire – including a paid time off program plus ten paid company holidays and three floating holidays each calendar year
• Paid volunteer time — 16 hours per calendar year
• Leave of absence programs – including paid parental leave, paid short- and long-term disability, and Family and Medical Leave (FMLA)
• Business Resource Groups (BRGs) – BRGs facilitate inclusion and collaboration across our business internally and throughout the communities where we live, work and play. BRGs are open to all.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree