Description

Our vision for the future is based on the idea that transforming financial lives starts by giving our people the freedom to transform their own. We have a flexible work environment, and fluid career paths. We not only encourage but celebrate internal mobility. We also recognize the importance of purpose, well-being, and work-life balance. Within Empower and our communities, we work hard to create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and our associates dedicate thousands of hours to volunteering for causes that matter most to them.

Chart your own path and grow your career while helping more customers achieve financial freedom. Empower Yourself.

Job Summary
As a Senior Data Architect at Empower, you will be both a strategic leader and hands on technical expert, shaping the company's cloud and data architecture. Partnering with enterprise architects, business leaders, and IT teams, you will define architectures, drive modernization initiatives and strategy aligning with Empower's long term vision for performance, efficiency, and cost optimization. You will also partner with Empower's Innovation Lab to explore emerging technologies including Generative AI and Advanced Analytics, translating experimentation into practical enterprise strategies. You will influence key architectural decisions, mentor teams, and help position Empower as leader in technology excellence.

Responsibilities

• Partner with the Enterprise Architects, Senior Architects, and cross functional teams including business stakeholders and executives to define and execute a unified IT data strategy

• Develop and maintain Empower's enterprise technology roadmap, including clear reference architectures for system components, integrations, and dependencies

• Lead the modernization and migration of complex systems to scalable, secure, and cost optimized cloud architectures

• Evaluate and pilot new technologies and applications, challenge existing approaches, and build strong business cases to influence strategic direction and drive innovation

• Establish and promote architectural standards, best practices, and governance frameworks while mentoring and coaching technology team members to ensure consistent adoption

• Collaborate closely with business and engineering teams to design end-to-end solutions that meet strategic, technical, and operational objectives

• Provide architectural leadership in process design, system orchestration, and enterprise integration to enable cohesive and efficient technology ecosystems

• Champion security, resilience, and scalability as core design principles across platforms and systems

• Deliver thought leadership in enterprise architecture, ensuring the discipline remains aligned with Empower's strategic priorities and evolving technology landscape

• Guide full stack development teams through solution design and implementation, driving long term architectural scalability, performance, and cost optimization

Required Skills

• Around 8 years in a data specialty such as engineering, platforms, or analytics, with 2+ years leading end to end solution design and architecture for complex initiatives across data, integration, application, infrastructure, and security

• Proven experience in multiple data focused roles including Data Engineer (ETL/ELT), Data Architect, Database Administrator, BI or Analytics Engineer, Data Science, data governance, or a similar field

• Competency in architecture frameworks, performance optimization, and addressing cross-cutting concerns including availability, caching, monitoring, scalability, and security

• Strong problem solving and strategic thinking, with a demonstrated ability to lead architectural governance, mentor engineers, and influence cross functional teams and executives in distributed environments

• Strong expertise in designing data and cloud architecture, AWS preferred, supporting scalability, performance, and security with systems such as Snowflake or Redshift

• Proven ability to translate complex data into actionable business insights and reporting solutions that provide comprehensive and up to date information to business users

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related discipline

Nice to Have Qualifications

• Streaming and event driven data specialist experience building and operating Kafka or Kinesis based architectures including ordering, replay, schema evolution, and real time observability

• API and integration specialist experience designing API first data access patterns, API lifecycle governance, versioning, security, and developer enablement, plus event driven integration patterns to reduce point to point complexity

• Data platform modernization specialist experience designing large scale ingestion and processing platforms using Spark or comparable distributed compute and orchestrating reliable batch and near real time pipelines

• Data security and privacy specialist experience implementing encryption, masking or tokenization, access controls, and auditability patterns for sensitive data and regulated environments

• Cloud cost and performance specialist experience applying FinOps practices, workload right sizing, storage optimization, and performance engineering for cloud data platforms

• DevOps for data specialist experience building CI/CD for data pipelines, infrastructure as code practices, and container platforms such as Kubernetes or EKS for data workloads

• Applied AI and GenAI specialist experience designing safe enterprise patterns for retrieval, evaluation, monitoring, and responsible AI adoption

• Broad polyglot engineering specialist experience with Java, microservices patterns, and third party API integrations that support data intensive services

• Certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate or Professional)

Education

• Bachelor's and/or master's degree in computer science or related field (information systems, mathematics, software engineering, etc.)

Physical Requirements/Working Conditions

• Normal Office Working Conditions

We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to diversity. All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, pregnancy, religion, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable state or local law.