VP, Architecture

Job Overview

Title:

VP, Architecture

Location:

Remote – USA, Canada

Reports to:

Chief Technology Officer

Vacancy:
Existing Vacancy

As the VP of Architecture, you will be the driving force behind how JD Power designs, builds, and evolves its technology. By establishing clear architectural standards, a published set of North Star principles, and a disciplined architecture review process, you will raise engineering quality, reduce duplicated effort, and accelerate delivery across product lines. You will lead enterprise-level technology decisions—such as the choice of AI tooling, UI stack, customer identity and access management (CIAM), and data platform—and ensure those decisions are consistently adopted.

• Architectural Standards & North Star Principles
  • Own Enterprise Architecture:
    Consolidate the disparate architectural conventions of acquired entities into a single set of enterprise standards, reference architectures, and playbooks.
  • Publish North Star Principles:
    Define, publish, and maintain the North Star technical principles—covering front-end frameworks, back-end services, authentication, data platform, and CI/CD—and keep them current as technology evolves.
  • Drive Enterprise Technology Decisions:
    Lead enterprise-level technology choices (e.g., AI tooling, UI stack, CIAM, data platform) with clear rationale, and ensure consistent adoption across all engineering teams.
  • Champion Consistency & Reuse:
    Promote shared component libraries, common patterns, and a consistent look, feel, and engineering experience across all JD Power products.
• Architecture Team & Guild Leadership
  • Lead the Enterprise Architecture Team:
    Build, mentor, and direct a small, high-caliber team of enterprise architects responsible for cross-cutting and enterprise-scope initiatives.
  • Lead the Architect Guild:
    Lead the guild of architects embedded within engineering teams under the SVP of Engineering—setting their charter, raising their capability, and aligning their work to enterprise standards while preserving team autonomy.
  • Operate a Federated Model:
    Establish a federated (hybrid) governance model that balances local team ownership of system-level decisions with enterprise consistency on cross-cutting concerns.
  • Develop Architecture Talent:
    Develop architecture talent, define career paths and expectations for architects across the organization, and grow the bench of senior technical leaders.
• Architecture Review & Governance
  • Establish the Review Process:
    Design and run a two-tier architecture review process: product-specific reviews led by embedded architects, and enterprise-level reviews led by the enterprise architecture team.
  • Chair the Architecture Council:
    Stand up and lead an architecture council—comprising enterprise, embedded, and Tech Ops architects—to evaluate initiatives of enterprise scope and resolve cross-cutting design decisions.
  • Integrate with Planning:
    Integrate architecture review into the quarterly planning cadence, with clear triggers, standardized review artifacts, and a documented path for escalation from team-level to enterprise-level review.
  • Govern with Transparency:
    Centralize architecture review artifacts and decisions (e.g., ADRs) so that rationale is transparent, discoverable, and reusable across the organization.
• Partnership & Influence
  • Partner Across Technology:
    Partner closely with the SVP of Engineering, the VP of Infrastructure, Tech Ops, and Security to ensure architecture decisions are practical, secure, and operable.
  • Advise Executive Leadership:
    Provide executive leadership with clear visibility into key architectural decisions, technical risk, and standards adoption across the engineering organization.
  • Lead Through Influence:
    Influence engineering teams toward sound architecture through clarity, credibility, and collaboration rather than mandate alone.

• 15+ years of progressive experience in software engineering and technical architecture.
• 5+ years in a VP or Sr. Director architecture leadership role with responsibility for enterprise-wide standards.
• Demonstrated success leading and developing teams of architects, and influencing engineering organizations toward consistent standards.
• De…