Enterprise Architect Principal

Northwestern Mutual (NM) is seeking an Enterprise Architect Principal to join our growing Cloud Platform team. The Cloud Platform team harnesses the power of the public cloud to empower our organization, enabling teams to develop digital solutions for both our clients and internal customers.

Our platforms and experiences drive business acceleration through the valuable abstraction of consistent patterns, robust automation, and a steadfast commitment to delivering value. We prioritize collaboration, scalability, compliance, and user focus, ensuring that our cloud solutions meet the evolving needs of our organization and enhance the end-user experience.

Summary

As a Principal Architect in the Cloud and DevOps organization, you are a recognized expert in multiple technology domains and represent the senior technical leadership within the organization. You will drive the direction of the technology strategy for our Cloud platform, assisting CDO leaders and other senior technical leaders in creating strategic roadmaps and setting priorities to help our engineering partners execute our multi-year strategy.

Primary Duties & Responsibilities:

• Set the strategy on teams' service offerings in collaboration with technical products and engineering that support NM's business strategies and outcomes, aligning with technology target state architecture while keeping in lockstep with cloud service providers (CSP) product and feature releases.

• Teach, mentor, grow, and advise other domain experts, and individual contributors, across several teams in our organization.

• Lead complex programs that span departments and divisions and act as a single point of accountability for execution and delivery by working backward from the desired outcome.

• Ability to collaborate and provide leadership in a larger group of technical/engineering leads, Directors, and VPs and be accountable for owning the planning/program to drive efforts towards defined outcomes that align with strategic business goals.

• A recognized thought leader in their organization in current and legacy technologies like Application Platforms (e.g., Cloud platform vs. Legacy Platform models), CI/CD tooling and practices, Integration patterns, or Master Data Management.

• Ensures key architectural patterns, engineering practices, and standards are used and drive them across the organization in partnership with EA and ESD. Participates in EA's Federated Architecture roundtable.

• Ensures business department projects align with the department's long-term priorities (connect projects to strategy)

• Applies broader organization, process, and technology opportunities to a business department with an "innovation mindset."

• Assumes a lead role in Identifying cross-departmental synergies and dependencies (including technical) and champion strategies (business and technical).

• Integrates business priorities into enterprise technology strategy.

• Partners with teams to identify functional gaps/opportunities and assumes the lead role in developing roadmaps for addressing functional gaps.

• Continuously reinforce a quality-obsessed culture; re-imagine and establish metrics and processes to elevate the quality continually. Maintaining and continuing to foster a team culture of "you build it, you own it."

• Take the initiative, work independently, and deliver results-extreme attention to detail and ability to self-audit work.

• Teach, mentor, and advise other domain experts as well as junior engineers.

• Lead complex programs and act as a single point of accountability.

Experience and Skills:

• Bachelors or Master Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field preferred. Advance degrees or certifications are a plus.

• Over 10 years of experience in software engineering, systems engineering, DevOps, or Cloud.

• Strong relationships with multiple business and technology stakeholders.

• Ability to successfully communicate to technical and non-technical audiences in varying forms and all levels of detail.

• Solid understanding of design patterns and architecture.

• Ability to influence teams, technology, or business leaders on impactful issues and decisions.

• Track record of successfully driving impactful improvements to large, complex technology ecosystems over an extended period

• Extensive experience with public cloud - AWS or Azure

• Certification(s) preferred in cloud space (AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, etc.)

• Certification(s) preferred in security space (AWS Certified Security - Specialty, CCSP, CISSP, etc.)