Principal Architect

Description

The company is a mutual insurer owned by its policyholders across Iowa and South Dakota. It has more than 80 years of history and puts its members ahead of profit.

The technology team builds modern solutions with current tools to improve the customer experience and drive how the organization works.

This principal architect role sets enterprise architecture direction, governs standards, and guides several engineering teams toward business goals and modernization.

Responsibilities

• Set and enforce enterprise architecture standards, principles, and best practices, and lead architecture reviews.
• Lead technical direction for several engineering teams.
• Build technology roadmaps that match business goals and modernization work.
• Create reusable reference architectures, frameworks, and governance processes.
• Assess new technologies and lead their adoption.
• Find ways to use AI to improve business processes and engineering productivity.
• Design and govern enterprise AI solutions, including responsible AI practices.
• Run domain discovery and event storming workshops with business and technical stakeholders.
• Define bounded contexts, aggregates, domain services, and domain events.
• Oversee the design, performance, and availability of highly integrated, complex application, cloud, and system platforms, making sure solutions follow architecture standards and service level agreements.
• Keep solutions current with industry practice, technology, and the company's standards.
• Shape the design and build of technology solutions so they address security issues systematically and follow secure coding practices.
• Create security patterns and enterprise control frameworks.
• Support complex integrations and work across functions with business leaders, platform engineers, solution architects, and other technology stakeholders on secure system planning and delivery.
• Lead partnerships with technology stakeholders, including lead architects, platform engineers, and cloud service engineers, to guide security process improvements.
• Propose mitigations for applications, cloud, and systems across infrastructure, architecture, and secure coding.
• Mentor architects, security engineers, and cloud engineers on projects, design, security requirements, and engineering tasks.
• Advise senior management on security risks and technology policy, and develop security architecture standards.
• Lead technical review of supported solutions, including vendor evaluation during selection, vendor integration, design, implementation, and administration.
• Provide design specifications to governing boards for approval, and uphold and promote architecture governance and technical standards, including the SDLC.
• Give expert guidance on technology policy, security, and infrastructure, and work with team members on security and compliance issues.
• Build strong relationships with the business and keep technical designs aligned with business needs, delivering high-quality customer service.
• Help develop the architecture roadmap and artifacts.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Requirements

• Required: A bachelor's degree, or equivalent direct and applicable work experience.
• Required: At least 9 years of experience, which may combine security application work such as program controls, processes, and security tools including encryption at rest and in transit.
• Required: At least 4 years of cloud architecture experience covering system integration, application development, and system analysis.
• Required: Deep understanding of network protocols and how enterprise networks are built, with the ability to research, design, and deliver full solutions spanning several technologies.
• Required: Experience securing workloads.
• Required: Experience migrating workloads to public cloud (Amazon, Google, Microsoft).
• Required: Hands-on handling of CASB tooling, covering single sign-on, authorization, encryption, and similar.
• Required: Hands-on work with both SQL and NoSQL databases.
• Required: Self-starter who leads others, focuses on results and outcomes, and adapts well to change.
• Required: Experience handling stakeholder concerns and communicating clearly and concisely, including counseling stakeholders.
• Required: Proven change agent who influences others to get work done, reach consensus, or take action.
• Required: Strong business knowledge, able to synthesize complex information and reach logical recommendations, and to see situations from the stakeholder's view.
• Required: Able to stay effective through major changes in work tasks, environment, processes, or culture.
• Required: Able to coach and mentor, giving guidance and feedback that builds people's knowledge and skills and improves job performance.
• Preferred: Has led architecture across several teams and business units.
• Preferred: Strong expertise in Azure and AI platforms.
• Preferred: Experience setting architecture governance and engineering standards.
• Preferred: Strong background in modernization and cloud transformation.
• Preferred: Ability to influence executives and shape strategic technology decisions.
• Preferred: Enjoys mentoring engineers and building engineering excellence.
• Preferred: Balance of strategic thinking and hands-on technical depth.

Conditions

Travel up to 5% of the time.

Applicants who meet the definition of a "Covered DoD official" must say so.

The company is not considering applicants who need any immigration sponsorship, now or in the future, to work in the United States, including F1-OPT, F1-CPT, H-1B, TN, L-1, J-1, and similar. Work authorization questions can be checked against the government resources on nonimmigrant workers and green cards for employment-based immigrants.

The company welcomes responsible use of AI tools by applicants.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and keeps applicant information confidential under EEO guidelines.