Associate Enterprise Security Architect

At Upbound Group, we are committed to elevating financial opportunity for all through innovative, inclusive, and technology-driven financial solutions that address the evolving needs and aspirations of consumers. The Company’s customer-facing operating units include industry-leading brands such as Rent‑A‑Center, Acima, and Brigit that facilitate consumer transactions across a wide range of store‑based and digital retail channels, including over 2,400 company‑branded retail units across the United States, Mexico, New York and Puerto Rico.

Upbound Group, Inc. is headquartered in Plano, Texas.

The Associate Enterprise Security Architect helps shape and scale the organization’s security architecture across the enterprise. This role partners with Enterprise Architecture, Security Engineering, IT, Platform Engineering, Cloud Operations, Privacy and Risk/Compliance to define security standards, reference architectures, and guardrails that ensure technology solutions are secure, consistent, and aligned with business objectives. This is a growth role for someone who understands core security domains and wants to expand into enterprise-level architecture, strategy, and cross‑team influence.

• Assist in developing and maintaining enterprise security architecture standards, patterns, reference architectures and designs (identity, network segmentation, endpoint, cloud, application, data protection, AI, etc.).
• Assist in building the Enterprise Security Architecture framework for the company utilizing SABSA methodology at the direction of a SABSA certified architect.
• Participate in architecture and design reviews to ensure major initiatives align with enterprise security principles, approved patterns, and business objectives.
• Help define security requirements and controls that can be reused across teams, products, and platforms, including AI controls focused on GenAI, Agents, Agentic, MCP, RAG, etc.
• Support the creation and maintenance of target‑state security roadmaps (e.g., Zero Trust adoption, logging and detection strategy, IAM modernization, AI Security).
• Contribute to security governance processes, including exception handling, risk acceptance support, and documenting architectural decisions.
• Partner with Security Engineering and IT to ensure enterprise standards can be implemented operationally (pragmatic, measurable, and supportable).
• Assist in vendor and technology evaluations to ensure tools align with architectural standards and integrate with the broader ecosystem.
• Help map security architecture to compliance frameworks and internal policies (NIST CSF, NIST AI RMF, SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, etc.), ensuring designs support auditability.
• Contribute to metrics and reporting on architecture adoption (pattern usage, exceptions, gaps, and roadmap progress).
• Maintain clear architecture documentation and communicate standards to stakeholders through presentations, docs, and working sessions.

• Identity and Access Management (SSO, MFA, lifecycle automation, privileged access)
• Network and segmentation models (Zero Trust, secure access, remote connectivity)
• Cloud security baselines (landing zones, guardrails, policy‑as‑code)
• Data classification and protection (encryption, key management, DLP, DSPM)
• AI Security (data security and governance, model security, API, IAM, IRP)
• Logging, monitoring, and detection architecture (SIEM strategy, telemetry standards)
• Secure SDLC guardrails (security gates, code scanning standards, secrets management)

• 2 to 5+ years of experience in information security, security engineering, IT, systems engineering, or related technical roles.
• Working knowledge of core security domains: IAM, network security, endpoint security, vulnerability management, encryption, and logging/monitoring, data protection.
• Familiarity with cloud concepts and shared responsibility (AWS, Azure, and/or GCP) and how security guardrails are implemented in cloud environments.
• Experience with design and implementation of AI security controls for enterprise environments.
• Ability to translate security risk into clear requirements…