Enterprise Architect

At Acra Lending, our employees enjoy the opportunity to work with great people. We celebrate several events throughout the year, accompanied by raffles and giveaways across the country. We are especially proud to give back to our community and truly enjoy one another’s company.

We are looking for candidates who are passionate about their vocation, committed to making a contribution, and are looking to gain experience in order to grow in their career. Our headquarters are located on a beautiful campus in Irvine, California; if you work out of our Irvine office we can also provide a free gym membership.

Summary

Acra is a Non-QM wholesale mortgage lender modernizing its lending platform and partner‑facing experiences. As our Enterprise Architect, you will own the end‑to‑end architecture direction across platforms (LOS, pricing, TPO portal, data, integrations) and guide teams toward secure, scalable, and resilient solutions. You’ll create the architecture roadmap, establish standards, and coach engineering and vendor teams while partnering with Product, Security, and Operations.

Base salary: $140,000–$150,000 annually.

Essential Duties And Responsibilities Architecture Strategy & Roadmap

• Define and maintain the multi‑year target architecture and evolutionary roadmap spanning LOS (e.g., Byte), pricing (Loan Pass), TPO/Glide portal, data/analytics, and automation platforms.
• Drive rationalization of systems and integration patterns; identify build‑vs‑buy and sequencing.

Integration Architecture

• Establish reference integrations for internal and external systems (e.g., pricing/lock, AUS, disclosures, trade management, vendor APIs such as FEMA).
• Standardize API guidelines (REST/Graph
  
  QL), events, and messaging; promote reuse via integration catalogs.

Security & Data Governance

• Partner with Info Sec and Compliance to embed security‑by‑design, least privilege, and data protection throughout.
• Define data domains, ownership, lineage, retention, and privacy controls (e.g., CCPA) across platforms.
• Champion PII handling standards, tokenization, and field‑level encryption where appropriate.

Environment & Deployment Standards

• Define environments (dev/test/stage/prod), branching, versioning, promotion, and change control.
• Set IaC patterns, release orchestration, and rollback strategies; ensure observability (logging/metrics/tracing).

Reference Blueprints & Guardrails

• Publish reference blueprints and sample code (no production ownership); provide quality gates (contract tests, schema validation for MISMO/ULAD).
• Create solution design templates and an ADR process; run design reviews and approvals.
• Define SLIs/SLOs and error budgets; engineering implements and reports.

Coaching & Technical Leadership

• Mentor developers and vendor teams on architecture best practices, SDLC modernization, and secure coding.
• Facilitate threat modeling, scalability reviews.

Qualifications

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years in software architecture or senior engineering roles managing developer resources, including 3+ as an enterprise/solution architect.
• Proven experience leading architecture for integration‑heavy platforms and vendor ecosystems.
• Strong background with cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP), networking fundamentals, API management, and event‑driven systems.
• Hands‑on with CI/CD, IaC (e.g., Terraform), containerization/orchestration, and observability tooling.
• 5+ years programming experience in multiple languages, preferably T‑SQL, Java, and Python.
• Excellent written/verbal communication; able to drive clarity and decisions with executives and engineers.

Additional Desired Qualifications

• Mortgage/financial services background: LOS connectivity (e.g., Byte), MISMO 3.4/ULAD familiarity, pricing/lock workflows, disclosures/CCPA.
• Experience maturing SDLC (CI/CD, IaC, automated QA) and introducing AI‑assisted engineering practices (copilots, code generation, test…