Lead Solution Architect

The Lead Solution Architect is responsible for defining and driving technology architecture strategy across Group Benefits a major business segment within the Canadian business segment. This role provides strategic leadership to architecture teams, establishes technology standards, influences executive decision-making, and ensures technology investments align with business outcomes, resilience objectives, and enterprise architecture principles.

Position Responsibilities:

Architecture Strategy & Leadership

• Define and evolve architecture vision, roadmaps, and target-state capabilities.

• Drive alignment between business strategy and technology investments.

• Provide thought leadership on emerging technologies, modernization, cloud, AI, data, and platform strategies.

• Act as the senior architecture advisor to business and technology executives.

Business Unit Architecture Governance

• Establish and govern architecture standards, patterns, and reference architectures.

• Lead architecture review boards and major design decisions.

• Ensure technology solutions adhere to enterprise principles and security requirements.

• Drive consistency across domains, platforms, and delivery teams.

• Designing for both functional and non-functional qualities, including availability, resiliency, security, privacy, etc.

• Assisting the business in the scoping and planning of upcoming initiatives and roadmap items

• Participating in or leading in producing conceptual, solution, and component-level architectures and associated artifacts

• Reviewing, advising, and providing feedback on architectures produced within and outside the team

Technology Transformation

• Lead large-scale transformation initiatives spanning multiple portfolios.

• Guide application modernization, cloud adoption, platform engineering, and resilience programs.

• Identify opportunities for simplification, standardization, and cost optimization.

• Influence investment prioritization and technology roadmaps.

Stakeholder Management

• Partner with executive leaders, engineering teams, product leaders, risk, security, and operations.

• Build consensus across complex stakeholder groups.

• Present architectural recommendations and business cases to senior leadership.

Talent & Community Leadership

• Leading a team of solution architects (3-5), business architects (3-5), data architects (1-2) and platform architects (1-2).

• Mentor solution, business, data and platform architects.

• Foster a culture of innovation, engineering excellence, and knowledge sharing.

• Champion architecture best practices across the organization.

Required Qualifications:

• 15+ years of progressive technology experience.

• 3+ years in enterprise, or principal architecture leadership roles.

• Deep expertise in enterprise architecture, cloud platforms, distributed systems, and modern engineering practices.

• Experience leading enterprise-scale modernization programs.

• Strong executive communication, influencing, and governance skills.

• Proven ability to drive alignment across large organizations.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Financial services or highly regulated industry experience.

• Experience with AI, digital platforms, data architecture, and technology resilience.

• Architecture certifications (TOGAF, cloud certifications, etc.).

When you join our team:

• We’ll empower you to learn and grow the career you want.

• We’ll recognize and support you in a flexible environment where well-being and inclusion are more than just words.

• As part of our distributed team, we’ll support you in shaping the future you want to see.

The role being advertised is an existing vacancy.

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