Head of Enterprise Architecture, SVP

State Street•Quincy, MA

3d•$225,000 - $337,500

About The Position

The Head of Enterprise Architecture owns the target-state design of the technology estate and the standards, patterns, and governance through which it is realised. The role is responsible for reducing complexity and technical debt, rationalising a fragmented estate, and establishing reusable architectural foundations that help engineering teams move faster within known-good boundaries. Success is measured by estate outcomes such as fewer bespoke solutions, faster architectural decisions, lower run costs, and readiness for technological change, including Frontier AI and post-quantum cryptography. The role establishes the architecture that enables the firm to become AI-forward, including compute, serving, integration, and control foundations for governed production AI. It partners with the Head of Data & AI, who owns model strategy, data products, and AI delivery. This is a deeply technical leadership position requiring principal-level architectural credibility and the ability to lead through technical authority, including authoring reference architectures, defending standards, and presenting estate-rationalisation cases to senior leadership. Architecture is intended to enable rather than impede delivery. Governance should accelerate good decisions, with reusable patterns providing the preferred way to build and deviations handled through time-boxed, registered exceptions. The role serves the full technology estate, including mainframe, vendor-package, analytics, and quant populations, and treats cost and unit economics as architectural concerns. It owns cross-domain interfaces, standards, and coherence rather than peer functions’ delivery responsibilities. The Head of Enterprise Architecture will own enterprise architecture strategy and governance; curate standards and patterns; define AI-enabling architecture and controls; optimise technology spend; and build and lead a global enterprise and domain architecture team. The role will also establish an architecture community of practice and mentor senior engineers into architecture careers.

Requirements

Extensive hands-on engineering and architecture experience culminating in principal-architect or enterprise-architecture leadership roles, with demonstrable personal technical depth.
Proven delivery of enterprise-wide architecture programmes across multi-cloud and hybrid estates at material scale, including responsibility for target-state definition and realisation.
Deep expertise in cloud-native architecture, Kubernetes, distributed systems, event streaming, API and integration patterns, infrastructure-as-code, and zero-trust security architecture.
Demonstrable depth in AI infrastructure architecture, including model serving and inference optimisation, accelerated-compute cluster design, vector-store selection and design, retrieval patterns, and AI observability.
Working knowledge of AI governance architecture, including model-risk tiering, explainability tooling, data-provenance controls, and audit-trail design for AI-assisted decisions.
A track record of earning architectural adoption through influence and demonstrated value across a large, federated, sometimes skeptical organisation.
Executive presence and ability to defend standards with senior engineers and present investment and rationalisation cases to senior leadership.
Ability to partner with the Head of Data & AI and CISO on AI architectural controls.
Ability to operate across the full estate, including mainframe, vendor-package, analytics, and quant environments.

Nice To Haves

Financial-services or comparably regulated experience, with working knowledge of SR 11-7, DORA, FFIEC, BCBS 239, or OCC Heightened Standards, and awareness of EU AI Act risk classification.
Experience building an enterprise pattern library from a standing start and demonstrably reducing time to architectural decision.
Experience defining an AI reference architecture adopted across multiple product teams, moving AI from isolated proofs of concept to governed production capability.

Responsibilities

Own the enterprise technology blueprint across infrastructure, cloud, security, data, and application domains, maintaining a coherent target state aligned with long-term business strategy.
Chair the Technology Standards Board and own EARB/SARB review mechanisms, using decision logs, fitness functions, and time-boxed exception processes.
Partner with business-unit technology leaders to prevent enterprise-wide integration debt and delineate architecture accountability from engineering execution.
Define, curate, and govern the enterprise pattern library across infrastructure, cloud, integration, security, and AI/ML domains, with a formal maturity model.
Extract patterns from production systems and turn institutional knowledge into documented, reusable assets.
Publish a quarterly Technology Radar with adopt, trial, assess, and hold guidance, and assign executive accountability for retiring end-of-life technologies.
Define the AI infrastructure reference architecture, including accelerated compute, model serving, inference optimisation, AI gateways, and access-governance patterns.
Establish architectural standards for agentic systems, including orchestration topology, tool-use patterns, human-in-the-loop escalation, and audit-trail requirements.
Own the architectural control framework for AI, including risk tiering, explainability requirements, data provenance controls, and output governance, jointly with the Head of Data & AI and the CISO.
Build approved AI integration patterns for RAG, document intelligence, structured output generation, and model-in-the-loop workflows.
Build cost-transparency models mapping vendor spend, cloud consumption, and accelerated-compute cost to platform capability and business value; benchmark against peer institutions.
Lead estate-rationalisation reviews to identify consolidation opportunities, renewal risk, vendor concentration, and underutilised assets.
Establish AI infrastructure unit economics, including comparisons among on-premise GPUs, cloud instances, and foundation-model API consumption.
Build and lead a global enterprise and domain architecture team, consolidating distributed architecture capability and supplementing it with targeted external hires.
Establish an architecture community of practice to extend influence into engineering teams without proportional headcount growth, and mentor senior engineers into architecture career paths.

Benefits

Retirement savings plan (401K) with company match.
Insurance coverage including basic life, medical, dental, vision, long-term disability, and optional additional coverages.
Paid time off including vacation, sick leave, short-term disability, and family-care responsibilities.
Access to an Employee Assistance Program.
Incentive compensation, including eligibility for annual performance-based awards (excluding certain sales roles subject to sales incentive plans).
Eligibility for certain tax-advantaged savings plans.
Inclusive development opportunities.
Flexible work-life support.
Paid volunteer days.
Employee networks.