Head, Data & AI Platforms and Architecture

Job Posting End Date:
October 23

Our Fortune 500 company is driving a digital transformation and looking for forward-thinking innovators to disrupt how our industry thinks about and uses technology. As one of the world's leading employee benefits providers, we help millions of people gain affordable access to benefits that help them protect their families, their finances and their futures.

Are you an asker of questions, a solver of problems, and a challenger of the status quo? Our mission is to provide a differentiated customer experience and exceed the expectations people have of technology at any company — not just insurers. We are seeking individuals to join our team of talented IT professionals who share never-ending passion and an unwavering focus on our customer experience.

Team members comfortable working in an agile, fast-paced, and delivery-focused environment thrive in our environment where we value an entrepreneurial spirit and those who challenge the status-quo.

Unum is changing, and we’re excited about what’s next. Join us.

General

Summary:

Head of Platforms & Architecture is the single accountable executive for the technology foundation on which Unum's data, analytics and AI ambitions are built. This leader owns the strategy, architecture, and governance of Unum's enterprise data platforms, agentic AI and AI governance platforms, and business intelligence and data marketplace platforms.

This leader must be equally credible in a deep technical design review, in a vendor negotiation with a hyperscaler or platform provider, and in front of the Executive Committee or Board describing the business value of the platform investment.

The incumbent leads a multi-disciplinary organization of data architects, AI architects, data modelers, and sets the technical standards, reference architectures and guardrails followed across all of Unum's data and AI delivery teams.

Principal Duties and Responsibilities Define and own the multi-year enterprise data platform strategy, including the target-state lakehouse/warehouse architecture, platform-of-record decisions, coexistence and consolidation strategy, and the migration roadmap away from legacy on-premises data warehouses, mainframe extracts, and point-to-point integrations.

Establish and enforce reference architectures for ingestion, storage, transformation, orchestration, and serving. Set standards for data contracts, schema evolution, data product interfaces, and interoperability.

Provide the shared frameworks, templates, CI/CD pipelines, testing harnesses and reusable components that allow business-aligned data engineering teams to deliver quickly and consistently on the platform, rather than reinventing plumbing.

Own the platforms for master and reference data management

Ensure the data platform meets enterprise SLAs for availability, recovery, performance, and scalability; embed security-by-design in partnership with Information Security and Enterprise Risk.

Own the cloud and platform consumption model; implement Fin Ops practices  and be accountable for unit-cost trends and total cost of ownership of the data estate.

Lead the decommissioning of redundant data stores, ETL tools and reporting marts, quantifying and delivering run-cost savings and risk reduction.

Ensure platform controls, evidence and documentation satisfy internal audit, model risk management, SOX ITGCs, state insurance regulators, and requirements.

Define and deliver Unum's enterprise platform for building, deploying, orchestrating, and governing AI agents and GenAI applications — including foundation-model access, model gateways, retrieval, agent orchestration and tool-calling frameworks, memory, and human-in-the-loop controls.

Evaluate and select agentic and AI platform…