Director, Enterprise Architect Solution

Job Description
The Lead Enterprise Architect is responsible for the application and business architecture domains across Shared Services. The candidate will be a key member of the Shared Services Architecture team whose collective responsibility is to promote strategic technology advancement across the organization through a set of fully aligned technical strategies, roadmaps, designs, patterns, and frameworks. This role will partner with executives, their architects and application development teams, and firmwide architects.

Must demonstrate a proven history of building large scale technology solutions that effectively address the business objectives of a complex organization. Ensures that business strategy along with market & technology trends are effectively represented in the organization’s systems and business processes. Analyzes the architectural requirements, defines the vision, defines the target state architecture, analyzes the current state, establishes roadmaps and governs the project portfolio and partners with solution architects/engineers to realize the target state.

This individual must be delivery-oriented, possess excellent analytical and communication skills with the ability to reach senior business management as well as technical audiences. Must be able to influence project direction and make pragmatic decisions to optimize the balance between strategic value, time to market, cost and risk. Identify shared services, overlapping capabilities and convergence to standards in order to improve efficiency and quality, and reduce time to value.

The preferred candidate will have a broad background in application development, cloud-native delivery, integration, data, and architecture. Must be able to work independently to solve complex problems, create/manage technology plans, yet possess the soft skills to work with a variety of partners.

Knowledge / Skills
Current hands-on software development experience.
Significant experience working with enterprise architecture patterns and solid background of enterprise architecture best practices
Expert-level knowledge of Azure Services including Messaging and Eventing Services, API Management, Azure Kubernetes, Azure Data Factory, Azure Functions and Azure Networking.
Hands-on experience building enterprise AI solutions, including LLM-based architectures, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Vector Databases and Agent Frameworks.
Ability to produce reference implementations, reusable accelerators and working examples to unblock engineering teams.
Experience using development languages and open source frameworks like Java, JavaScript, .Net, Spring, React

JS, etc.
Experience using SQL and No

SQL data platforms; e.g. Azure SQL, Azure Postgres, Oracle, SQL Server, Cosmos

DB.
Deep knowledge of Architecture Frameworks like TOGAF and/or Zachman
Knowledge of software development methodologies and tools like Agile (Kanban/Scrum) and GIT, Jira, Maven, Jenkins, etc.

Experience with Dev Ops best practices and toolchain / pipeline automation and Azure Dev Ops.
Knowledge of the financial services industry and in particular, a broad and deep understanding of products and services provided by Northern Trust.
Has an understanding of the Shared Services domains at Northern Trust (Cash, Asset Servicing, Risk and Compliance, HR, Finance)
Strong knowledge of security frameworks and controls.

Major Duties
Strategy
Creation of the Application, Technology and Business Architecture Strategies
Influence the strategy and vision of senior decision makers through articulated communications and presentations.
Ensures alignment between Technology & Business strategies
Roadmaps
Delivery of multi-year Application and Business Architecture Roadmaps
Influence project portfolios towards implementation of the target state
Reviews investment spend to ensure alignment with target state and roadmaps
Identify appropriate technical solutions that provide business value while mitigating technical debt.
Mediate conflicting priorities to drive optimal solutions.
Identify and escalates duplication of efforts, functional and technical redundancy, and enforces the use of existing firm-wide shared services.
Strateg…