Senior Associate - Solution Architect

New York Life • New York, NY

8d • $124,000 - $177,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Solution Architect plays a critical role in shaping New York Life's technology evolution across Life, Long-Term Care (LTC), Disability Insurance (DI), and Business Solutions. This role blends hands-on technical delivery expertise, system design and architecture capabilities, and strategic thought leadership to design robust, scalable, and modern solutions that accelerate business transformation. As a trusted advisor to both business and technology leaders, the architect will define solution architectures, guide engineering teams, modernize legacy systems, and ensure our platforms support seamless, differentiated customer and agent experiences. The ideal candidate brings deep financial services domain expertise, preferably in insurance or wealth management, along with the ability to evaluate, adopt, and govern emerging technologies, including Generative AI, Agentic AI, and advanced analytics, while maintaining a firm grasp of our legacy platforms and modernization patterns.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience designing, architecting, and delivering technology solutions in the financial services industry; insurance experience strongly preferred.
• Deep understanding of both modern architectures (SaaS, PaaS, APIs, microservices, event-driven patterns, containerization, cloud-native designs) and legacy environments (e.g., mainframe, policy administration systems, batch processing, DB2/Oracle, monolithic applications). Hands-on experience in both distributed systems and legacy systems is strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated ability to influence and collaborate with architects, engineers, product leaders, and senior business stakeholders across a large, complex organization.
• Proven experience architecting and implementing integration patterns, including APIs, service meshes, events/streams, and abstraction layers to decouple legacy systems from modern digital experiences.
• Proven experience in performing impact assessment (architecture, systems and functional) in enterprise scale eco-systems with varying degree of multi-tier architectures, enterprise data masters, hybrid cloud environments.
• Hands-on technical delivery background (e.g., software engineer, integration developer, systems engineer, cloud engineer) with the ability to engage at code, configuration, or pipeline level when needed.
• Familiarity with emerging technology trends, including Generative and Agentic AI, automation frameworks, and advanced analytics, with the ability to assess feasibility and business value.
• Experience in performing assessment to help build vs. buy vs. partner decisions.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to simplify complex technical concepts.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent hands-on technical experience.

Responsibilities

• Develop end-to-end solution architectures that align with Insurance Solutions' multi-year strategic roadmap and enterprise architecture standards.
• Create architectural blueprints, integration patterns, and modernization strategies for legacy platforms, ensuring scalability, resilience, security, and interoperability.
• Lead conceptual, logical, and physical architecture design, applying modern engineering practices (APIs, microservices, event-driven architecture, cloud-native design, containerization).
• Ensure architectural decisions support enterprise priorities such as data accessibility, cost optimization, risk reduction, and improved customer and agent experience.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership and guidance to engineering teams throughout design, build, testing, and deployment activities.
• Serve as the technical authority for large, cross-functional initiatives with complex dependencies across Life, LTC, DI, and Business Solutions.
• Partner with delivery leads and product owners to ensure solution integrity and architectural alignment throughout the development lifecycle.
• Identify and drive reductions in technical debt through structured modernization roadmaps, refactoring strategies, and improved engineering practices.
• Architect modernization pathways for core insurance systems, including re-platforming, refactoring, cloud migration, and transition to managed services where appropriate.
• Define integration strategies (APIs, event streams, messaging, service orchestration, abstraction layers) that enable flexible and future-ready interoperability across applications and channels.
• Promote standard patterns, reusable components, and shared services to reduce complexity and improve speed-to-market.
• Ensure data and integration approaches enable holistic customer views and support analytics, reporting, and AI-driven insights.
• Maintain expertise in emerging technologies, including Generative AI, Agentic AI, automation, and advanced analytics, and assess their applicability to insurance and wealth use cases.
• Evaluate vendors, platforms, and frameworks, and make recommendations for responsible adoption that balance innovation with risk, compliance, and operational readiness.
• Partner with data, AI, and cybersecurity teams to ensure solutions are secure, compliant, and aligned with enterprise guardrails.
• Educate engineering teams and business partners on relevant technology trends and the impact on customer, agent, and operational experiences.
• Collaborate with business leaders to understand objectives, translate them into technical and architectural requirements, and articulate solution options and trade-offs.
• Prioritize architectural investments that drive measurable business outcomes, including growth, efficiency, resilience, and experience.
• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly and concisely to senior stakeholders.
• Build trust-based relationships with product, operations, risk, and compliance partners across the organization.
• Ensure alignment to enterprise architecture principles, security patterns, and development best practices.
• Contribute to the evolution of reference architectures, technical standards, and architecture review processes.
• Advocate for consistency in solution design, documentation, and quality across teams and initiatives.
• Support the establishment and refinement of architecture guardrails that enable teams to move quickly while maintaining control and compliance.

Benefits

• leave programs
• adoption assistance
• student loan repayment programs

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior