Lead Technology Architect

WTW • Chicago, IL

10h • $160,000 - $210,000

About The Position

The Director, Technology Architecture is a senior technical leadership role within the Architecture Practice responsible for owning one or more architecture domains across the full HWC-BDA technology portfolio. The Architecture Practice governs standards, patterns, and compliance across two distinct businesses and multiple delivery streams, with a mandate to ensure that every technology decision made in those streams is made to a consistent and defensible standard. This role leads governance and continuous improvement within an assigned domain, sets the technical bar for how decisions are made and reviewed, and partners with delivery teams to ensure that every system built or modified meets that bar. The primary domain of focus for this hire is Quality Assurance and Test Engineering, though the role is designed to serve wherever senior architectural depth is needed as the practice grows. The right candidate brings deep technical expertise, a track record of driving adoption of standards across teams they do not directly manage, and the executive communication skills to make governance work credible and visible to business leadership.

Requirements

• Deep technical expertise
• Track record of driving adoption of standards across teams they do not directly manage
• Executive communication skills

Responsibilities

• Own governance and standards for one or more assigned architecture domains across the HWC-BDA technology portfolio. Define the policies, patterns, review gates, and compliance requirements that govern all technology work in those domains, and ensure they are applied consistently across delivery teams.
• Lead architecture and design reviews within the assigned domain, serving as the senior technical escalation point for design decisions that exceed what delivery teams can resolve independently. Provide clear, documented direction that helps teams move forward rather than stall.
• Define and maintain the quality and test engineering standards for the organization -- including automated test coverage thresholds, CI/CD gate requirements, defect severity classification, UAT governance, regression test suite standards, and performance and load testing requirements for shared platforms.
• Partner with delivery leaders and engineering teams to embed domain standards into the software development lifecycle. Governance must be applied at the point of design; this role ensures that happens through tooling, review processes, and close partnership with the teams doing the work.
• Drive continuous improvement across the domain practice. Assess current state against industry benchmarks, identify gaps in coverage, tooling, or process maturity, and build a roadmap to close them. Translate that roadmap into action.
• Contribute to enterprise-level strategic feasibility work: evaluate non-product technology initiatives, requests from senior business leadership, and architecture questions that require senior technical judgment before entering the delivery backlog. This work is high-visibility and low-volume by design.
• Represent the Architecture Practice in cross-functional forums, vendor evaluations, regulatory assessments, and enterprise technology governance bodies. The role operates at the intersection of technology and the business, and requires comfort in both settings.
• Define the metrics and reporting framework that make domain health visible to technology leadership and business stakeholders. Coverage rates, gate compliance, defect escape rates, and compliance findings should be tracked, trended, and reported on a regular cadence.
• Build and sustain a domain practice that scales across a distributed, geographically diverse engineering organization. That means documented standards, training materials, assessment frameworks, and a review model that enables delivery teams to operate with autonomy without producing fragmented outcomes.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed