Enterprise Architect

Enterprise Architect Role Summary

The Enterprise Architect shapes and governs the enterprise technology landscape of Upbound that involves Fintech, Specialty Financing, and Retail business to enable strategy, accelerate product delivery, and reduce complexity and risk. This role defines enterprise-wide architecture across business, application, data, integration, technology, and security
, establishes standards and reference architectures, and partners with product, engineering, risk, compliance, data, and platform teams to ensure solutions are scalable, resilient, cost-effective, and compliant.

The role operates in federated architecture model
: cloud, network, security, commerce, mobile, and other platform architects are embedded in their respective organizations and do not report into the EA organization. The Enterprise Architect drives cross-domain coherence, aligns platform to enterprise needs, and ensures end-to-end solutions integrate cleanly and meet non-functional requirements.

• Enterprise architecture strategy

  • Define and maintain enterprise architecture vision, principles, target-state architectures, and multi-year roadmaps aligned to business strategy – growth, conversion, loss reduction, and servicing efficiency.
  • Drive modernization, rationalization, and simplification across applications, platforms, and data domains spanning customer identity, underwriting/risk, fraud, pricing/discounting, payments/collections, servicing, customer engagement and customer communications
    .

• Federated architecture leadership (matrix influence)

  • Lead enterprise architecture outcomes in a federated model by partnering with embedded architects across cloud, network, security, commerce, mobile, and platform engineering
    .
  • Align enterprise standards and target-state direction with platform reference architectures and ensure consistent adoption across product pods.
  • Influence cross-team decisions through architecture forums, ADRs, and exception governance – driving outcomes without direct reporting authority.

• Architecture governance and decisioning

  • Lead architecture reviews (L2/L3, design authority, ARB) focused on cross-domain decisions – domain boundaries, integration approach, data contracts, security objectives, NFRs, exceptions.
  • Establish lightweight, outcome-based guardrails that support agile delivery – reference architectures, patterns, and decision records.
  • Maintain ADRs, exception management, and time bound remediation plans.

• Cross-domain architecture leadership

  • Partner with Solution Architects and Engineering Leads to design end-to-end solutions align with enterprise target state, domain boundaries, reference architectures, and cross-domain standards for data, integration, security, NFRs.
  • Ensure architectural consistency across product pods and shared platforms (customer identity & profile, commerce, underwriting services, servicing platforms, communication & engagement platforms, integrating/eventing, data/analytics, security).

• Standards, reference architectures, and reuse

  • Develop and publish enterprise reference architectures and standards for:
    • Integration (API/event/streaming), data/analytics, identity/IAM, security by design, observability, resiliency, and Dev Sec Ops .
    • Interoperability guardrails across platforms.
  • Create reusable patterns and components to reduce time-to-market and improve reliability especially around data contracts, event schemas, identity resolution, decisioning workflows, and auditability
    .

• Portfolio and technology planning

  • Influence investment decisions by translating architecture options into tradeoffs – cost, time, risk scalability, maintainability, operability, vendor lock-in.
  • Support vendor evaluations and build-vs-buy recommendations with clear criteria and decision records – especially where solutions cross domains or create enterprise-wide dependencies.

• Risk, security, and compliance

  • Embed security and compliance into enterprise design – zero trust objectives, IAM, encryption/tokenization where needed, privacy-by-design, audit logging, data retention.
  • Partner with Security/GRC and Risk to ensure architectures meet regulatory obligations and internal…