VP of Data Architecture

Empower • Overland Park, KS

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Vice President, Data Architecture is responsible for setting and driving Empower’s enterprise data architecture direction to support business growth, modernization, and a secure, scalable technology ecosystem. This role partners with engineering, platform, security, and business leaders to shape architectural decisions that improve stability, performance, time-to-value, and cost efficiency—particularly across Empower’s cloud-first strategy, integration evolution, and API-first integration patterns. This is a senior leadership role focused on architectural outcomes and decision-making, achieved through clear direction, practical guardrails, reusable patterns, and scalable operating practices rather than hands-on implementation.

Requirements

• Minimum ten (10) years relevant IT architecture experience, including at least four (4) years of experience directly managing people, including hiring, developing, motivating, and directing people as they work.
• High-level communications, consulting, and client relations experience with all levels of management.
• Strong executive acumen required.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to frame tradeoffs (risk, cost, stability, delivery speed) and drive decisions.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Information Systems, or equivalent experience.
• Experience in the retirement, wealth management, recordkeeping, or closely related financial services domain.
• Experience with AWS and cloud-first architectural patterns, including resiliency, automation, scalability, and cost visibility.
• Strong capability in reliability and operability practices, including observability, production readiness, failure modes, and availability patterns.
• Demonstrated ability to lead senior technical professionals and drive outcomes through influence and clear architectural decision-making.
• Strong understanding of enterprise data consumption patterns across BI/reporting, API/data services, and advanced analytics platforms.
• Strong security-by-design fundamentals for enterprise data access and integration, including encryption, access controls, auditing, and protection of sensitive data.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree in a related systems or business field (strongly desired).
• Experience with modern data platforms such as Snowflake and/or Redshift.
• Experience with distributed processing patterns.
• Experience with event-driven and streaming architectures for data movement, including operational considerations and scalable consumption patterns.
• Experience shaping enterprise API strategies and developer enablement patterns, including policies and reusable capabilities.
• Experience implementing CI/CD enablement for data pipelines, including testing strategies, deployment guardrails, and rollback approaches.
• Experience with cloud-native runtime environments such as Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with modern observability and monitoring approaches and tools.
• Experience partnering with innovation teams to implement analytics or GenAI capabilities in a controlled, secure way.

Responsibilities

• Lead the enterprise data architecture function, including hiring, developing, and retaining architecture talent, and setting expectations for how architecture work is produced, reviewed, and adopted across delivery organizations.
• Own Empower’s enterprise data architecture strategy and direction and hold the organization accountable for maintaining the target state, roadmaps, and guidance needed to execute modernization priorities.
• Direct the architecture team’s definition of enterprise patterns for data movement, processing, storage, and consumption across operational, analytical, and advanced analytics/AI use cases.
• Communicate enterprise data architecture direction to executives and delivery leaders, making tradeoffs explicit (risk, cost, stability, speed) and driving decisions that improve outcomes.
• Sponsor and oversee modernization of legacy data capabilities, ensuring the team drives migration sequencing, platform evolution guidance, and decommissioning plans that reduce complexity and technical debt.
• Partner with platform leadership to advance AWS-based cloud maturity and scalable platform patterns, ensuring the architecture team provides guardrails that enable automation, repeatability, and delivery speed.
• Own the enterprise approach to integration evolution and reusable integration capabilities, ensuring the team reduces point-to-point complexity and improves enterprise data access through consistent patterns.
• Ensure the team defines and drives API-first and event-driven patterns (including streaming where appropriate), with clear expectations for latency, scalability, resiliency, and consumer experience.
• Promotes the creation of architecture that conforms to enterprise standards.
• Oversee the definition of enterprise consumption standards across BI/reporting, APIs/data services, and analytics workbenches, including performance practices, traceability, and compliance/audit readiness.
• Sponsor architectural direction for ETL/ELT performance and cost optimization, ensuring the team establishes practices for tuning, workload design, capacity planning, and pipeline reliability instrumentation.
• Establish an architecture engagement model and operating rhythm that provides timely guidance and reduces late-cycle rework.

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: Executive
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees