Lead Solution Architect

1 week ago

Southwestern Ontario, ON, Canada Manulife Full-time

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 gro