Principal Enterprise Architect

Guardian Life Insurance•Holmdel Township, NJ

6d•$178,690 - $293,560

About The Position

The Principal Enterprise Architect is a senior architecture leader responsible for shaping, guiding, and advancing enterprise architecture across the organization. Reporting to the Head of Enterprise Architecture and Engineering Enablement, this role translates enterprise strategy into practical architecture direction, standards, target-state designs, and transition roadmaps across business capabilities, applications, platforms, data, integration, cloud, security, and emerging technology domains. While architecture is foundational, the Principal Enterprise Architect will be responsible for designing enterprise solutions in close collaboration with the business and technology stakeholders. Where applicable the role will be accountable to build solutions that scale for the enterprise. This position plays a critical role in connecting enterprise strategy to federated execution. The Principal Enterprise Architect partners with architecture, engineering, platform, security, data, and business technology leaders to ensure material technology decisions align with enterprise standards, target-state architecture, modernization priorities, and governance requirements. The role requires strong strategic thinking, architecture breadth, executive communication, and the ability to influence across a large, complex, and federated enterprise environment. The Principal Enterprise Architect provides architecture leadership and recommendations on material technology decisions and has delegated authority within the enterprise architecture operating model as assigned by the Head of Enterprise Architecture. The role is expected to escalate decisions with enterprise-wide impact, non-standard exceptions, or significant risk implications.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related field.
12+ years of progressive experience in enterprise architecture, solution architecture, domain architecture, or senior technology strategy roles.
Deep cross-domain expertise spanning applications, integration, data, AI, cloud, security, and platform strategy.
Experience supporting or leading architecture for large-scale transformation initiatives in complex enterprise environments.
Experience with architecture governance, standards development, target-state planning, and strategic technology decision-making.
Proven ability to influence across organizational boundaries without direct authority.
Strong written, verbal, and presentation communication skills.
Strong knowledge of enterprise architecture principles, methods, and governance practices.
Broad understanding of enterprise technology domains and cross-domain dependencies.
Ability to develop target-state architecture and pragmatic transition approaches.
Strong business acumen and ability to connect architecture decisions to business outcomes.
Ability to assess tradeoffs among speed, cost, quality, risk, and strategic fit.
Strong facilitation, negotiation, and stakeholder management skills.
Ability to communicate effectively with executive, business, and technical audiences.
Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities.
Ability to operate effectively in ambiguity and lead through influence.

Nice To Haves

Experience in insurance, financial services, healthcare, or another highly regulated industry.
Experience in a federated technology organization with centralized architecture direction and distributed execution.
Experience with cloud modernization, API strategies, platform engineering, data ecosystems, and enterprise integration.
Familiarity with AI-enabled enterprise capabilities, automation, and emerging technology trends.
Advanced degree and/or relevant certifications such as TOGAF, SAFe, AWS, Azure, GCP, or equivalent.

Responsibilities

Support the Head of Enterprise Architecture in developing and evolving enterprise architecture strategy, principles, standards, and target-state roadmaps.
Define and maintain architecture perspectives across business, application, data, integration, cloud, platform, security, and AI-related capabilities as applicable.
Own enterprise standards, target state, governance, exceptions, material technology decision frameworks
Translate enterprise strategy and target-state direction into practical guidance for domain architecture and engineering teams.
Promote alignment across business units, shared services, and technology domains.
Provide architecture leadership for major strategic initiatives, modernization programs, and enterprise-impacting technology decisions.
Assess architecture options and recommend solutions that balance business value, cost, risk, resilience, time to market, and long-term maintainability.
Support enterprise transformation through simplification, rationalization, modernization, and platform reuse.
Identify opportunities to reduce duplication, retire legacy complexity, and improve interoperability across the enterprise.
Participate in and support enterprise architecture governance, standards councils, review boards, and strategic decision forums.
Evaluate material technology decisions using approved enterprise frameworks, including buy, build, reuse, partner, and retire options.
Review architecture proposals for compliance with enterprise standards, target-state architecture, and risk requirements.
Support management of architecture exceptions, including rationale, risk analysis, remediation paths, and time-bound approvals.
Available for production incidents with major impact to business operations
Partner with federated domain architects, platform leaders, engineering teams, data and AI teams, security, infrastructure, and business technology leaders to drive alignment.
Facilitate resolution of cross-domain design issues, architecture conflicts, and overlapping capability decisions.
Act as a trusted advisor to leaders across technology and business-aligned delivery organizations.
Ensure architecture direction is understood and applied consistently across federated teams.
Works with Business Unit heads and principal solution architects to translate enterprise direction into federated execution.
Incorporate cybersecurity, privacy, resilience, recoverability, and regulatory considerations into architecture guidance and recommendations.
Partner with risk, security, and compliance stakeholders to ensure technology decisions align with enterprise control requirements.
Assess the operational and architectural implications of technology choices in regulated and high-availability environments.
Mentor and coach architects and senior technology professionals.
Contribute to architecture capability development, communities of practice, and architecture operating model maturity.
Support common role expectations, competency models, and quality standards across the architecture function.
Promote enterprise-first thinking, sound decision-making, and strong architecture discipline.