Sr. Enterprise Architect

About the role

At Northwestern Mutual, we believe relationships are built on trust. That our lives and our work matter. These beliefs launched our company nearly 160 years ago. Today, they're just a few of the reasons why people choose to build careers at Northwestern Mutual.

We're strong and growing. In a company with such a long and storied history, this may be the most exciting and important time to be a part of Northwestern Mutual. We're strong, innovative and growing.

We invest in our people. We provide opportunities for employees to grow themselves, their career and in turn, our business.

We care. We make a positive difference in our communities. Nationally, thousands have benefitted from our support of research and programs to fight childhood cancer. Each year, our Foundation, employees and financial representatives donate time, talent and financial support to causes they're passionate about.

As a member of our Digital Platform team within Enterprise Architecture, you would play a key role in Northwestern Mutual’s digital transformation, including application rationalization, and modernization. As we recently started our digital transformation journey, you will have a high degree of freedom to influence the roadmap.

The ideal candidate will have

• Deep understanding of more than one public cloud platform (AWS, Azure, Google) and experienced in delivering a multiple data center strategy that incorporates both cloud and on premise compute. Experience in migrating on premise systems to public cloud a plus.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and understanding of automation through triggered events either through code commits or other infrastructure conditions including developing secure practices in automation.
• Hands on experience with tools and technologies like Terraform, Packer, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Kubernetes, OpenShift a must.
• Deep understanding of cloud connectivity including transport security, storage security, key management and networking concerns. Experience with a KMS and NGINX/OpenResty a plus.
• Broad knowledge of basic compute capabilities including storage, networking and compute in on premise, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS deployment models.
• Experienced in architecting, designing and building scalable and performant cloud infrastructure for solutions with high availability, extreme reliability, service availability, and patching without service downtime.
• Prior experience of selecting and transition to production of vendor products including all phases including research, due diligence, qualification, selection, implementation and transition to support.
• Experienced in partnering with a diverse team of infrastructure engineers, creating a collaborative and transparent team environment, with a customer first mind set.
• Strong presentation and communication skills with a proven ability to engage and influence both technical and non-technical stakeholders, at all level of the organization including senior Management.
• Experience with full-lifecycle system deployment, participating in all facets of development (requirements gathering, design, implementation, unit testing, system testing, release and on-going service management)
• Demonstrated experience leading cross-functional teams through influence, collaboration, and partnership to deliver solutions that are optimized for the enterprise as opposed to optimizing for individual teams.
• Role Responsibility
• Lead development of designs & patterns
• Provide architectural alignment on crucial efforts (design, code, test, deploy)
• Identify technology/opportunities that advance our Digital Organization
• Direct alignment of tech decisions across the Enterprise with roadmaps and architectural development models
• Leads technical initiatives and organizational change across the enterprise

Provides day-today mentoring and coaching to less experienced professionals:

• Functional Skill Set
• Broad and deep technical experience, respected by peers
• Continually learning & applying new technologies
• Can solve technical as well as people/process challenges
• Communicate with senior business as well as senior technical leaders
• Deals with ambiguity and drives to needed outcomes
• Can tie IT capabilities with business needs and goals
• Interpersonal/Leadership
• Change Leader – influences above their level
• Moves easily between technical and business audiences
• Strong technical and business problem solving skills
• Strong sense of ownership and dedication to results

Requirements

• Must be passionate about creating solutions, and solving complex problems – in the right way, at the right time, and for the right reasons
• Experienced with and embraces Lean-Agile principles/DevOps environment
• Must be teachable, give and receive feedback, and demonstrate success in their discipline on a consistent and transparent basis
• Must be technology-agnostic; should not have a personal agenda or bias around technical decisions.
• Experience with Enterprise Architecture best practices and frameworks to include analyzing, designing, developing, deploying and supporting software solutions, and/or infrastructure implementations/upgrades.

Specific technical requirements / platforms will vary

Experience in working with diverse teams and bringing people together to deliver on outcomes despite challenges, ambiguity and adversity

• 6-8 years of Enterprise Architecture experience
• Req ID: 16746
• Position Type: Regular Full Time

Education Experience: Bachelor's Desired

• Employment Experience: 6-8 years
• Licenses/Certifications: FLSA Status: Exempt
• Posting Date: 08/24/2017