Principal Enterprise Architect

Principal Enterprise Architect

First Citizens Bank seeks an accomplished Principal Enterprise Architect to drive enterprise-wide execution of resiliency, disaster recovery, scalability, and high availability strategies across our technology portfolio. This role extends beyond architecture design to lead cross-functional alignment, influence decision-making, and accelerate execution across business, engineering, infrastructure, and operational teams.

The ideal candidate combines deep architectural expertise with exceptional organizational awareness, enabling them to navigate complex stakeholder environments, challenge assumptions constructively, and drive pragmatic solutions that balance business objectives, technology strategy, operational risk, and regulatory requirements. As a senior enterprise leader, you will build consensus, influence outcomes without direct authority, and ensure resiliency and scalability objectives are embedded into strategic initiatives and day-to-day technology delivery.

Remote eligible.

Enterprise Leadership, Influence & Execution

• Serve as the enterprise leader for resiliency and scalability outcomes, driving alignment across technology, operations, risk, and business stakeholders.
• Leverage deep organizational awareness to identify dependencies, remove barriers, and accelerate execution across complex initiatives.
• Influence strategic investment decisions by articulating technology risks, opportunities, trade-offs, and business impacts.
• Constructively challenge teams, leaders, and established approaches through data-driven analysis, problem solving, and collaborative engagement.
• Build consensus across diverse stakeholder groups while maintaining focus on long-term enterprise resiliency and scalability objectives.
• Partner with executives and delivery leaders to ensure architectural priorities translate into measurable business and technology outcomes.
• Establish governance mechanisms that drive accountability for resiliency, recovery, and availability commitments across the enterprise.

Enterprise Architecture Strategy & Leadership

• Define enterprise architecture strategies aligned with business objectives, operational resilience requirements, and growth trajectories.
• Establish enterprise standards, patterns, and reference architectures that enable scalable and resilient technology delivery.
• Lead enterprise decision-making processes that balance innovation velocity, operational stability, regulatory expectations, and risk management.
• Drive multi-year technology roadmaps and influence execution priorities across application, infrastructure, and platform teams.

Resiliency & Disaster Recovery Leadership

• Lead the enterprise resiliency agenda by partnering with engineering, infrastructure, operations, security, and risk teams.
• Establish enterprise disaster recovery strategies, recovery objectives, testing programs, and remediation plans.
• Drive organizational readiness through resiliency exercises, scenario planning, and operational preparedness initiatives.
• Facilitate post-incident reviews that focus on systemic improvement, accountability, and actionable remediation.
• Influence technology investment decisions that improve enterprise resilience and reduce operational risk.

Scalability & High Availability Leadership

• Drive adoption of enterprise-wide scalability and availability patterns across critical business platforms.
• Partner with product and engineering leaders to proactively identify growth constraints and operational risks.
• Lead capacity planning and availability strategies that support business growth and evolving customer demand.
• Ensure architecture and engineering decisions support established service-level objectives and business resiliency goals.

Architecture Advisory & Technical Leadership

• Provide architectural leadership for mission-critical initiatives and major transformation programs.
• Conduct architecture reviews focused on identifying risk, improving execution outcomes, and accelerating delivery.
• Coach technical leaders and engineering teams on resiliency, scalability, and operational excellence practices.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to executives and…