Senior Product Architect

Vanguard’s Institutional Investor Group helps bring investment success to millions of workers who participate in their employer-sponsored retirement plans. From Fortune 500 companies to small businesses, we work to develop the plan types and investment options that best serve each client. This also includes work with endowments and foundations. We believe in a holistic approach, working with employees (“plan participants”), those in charge of implementing the plans (“plan sponsors”) and our vast knowledge base (“consultants”) to create smart, tailored retirement plans to help people achieve their retirement goals.

The senior product architect will provide the technology thought leadership to shape the vision, strategic direction, and roadmaps for business technology programs and associated product families for Vanguard’s Institutional Investor Group. The role will entail defining the reference and implementation architectures for strategic business technology programs.

Responsibilities:

• Provides the architectural leadership in shaping strategic, business technology programs, with an emphasis on full stack application development.

• Utilizes domain knowledge and application portfolio knowledge to play a key role in defining the future state of large, business technology programs.

• Leads the definition of product roadmaps and architecture for a product family, according to business strategies and enterprise architecture.

• Acts as highest-level technical expert, resolving issues, assessing any potential risks and identifying solutions.

• Leads the discussions related to key product architecture decisions. Identifies new opportunities to improve products and provide input and support to the business.

• Utilizes broad and deep understanding of the competitive landscape and corporate and business unit strategies to provide context for architectural decision making.

• Attends financial industry conferences and engages in associated activities (e.g., conducting presentations, leading workshops, etc.).

• Monitors application implementation activity to ensure architecture and engineering best practices are upheld.

• Ensures application implementation solutions support the business objectives (asset gathering, cost optimization, client loyalty improvement), as appropriate.

• Participates in governance team discussions and provides a strong voice on critical decisions. Establishes relationships with senior IT and Business leaders for the purpose of advancing proposed application architecture solutions.

• Coaches and mentors more junior product architects. Participates in special projects and performs other duties as assigned.

Qualifications

• Undergraduate degree or equivalent combination of training and experience. Graduate degree preferred.

• Minimum eight years relevant work experience.

• Facilitates and advices on Enterprise level delivery and design of reusable artifacts and API interface specifications (XSD/WSDL/WADL/Swagger/OpenAPI/YAML) and API security standards and implementation (Oauth, OpenId)

• Research Emerging Technologies, and if applicable, lead the buildout of POC’s that demonstrate the potential relevance in business domains.

• Full-Stack development experience – Java, Spring, Angular and DB technologies

• Database skills – Oracle, PostgreSQL and DynamoDB

Special Factors
Vanguard is not offering visa sponsorship for this position.

Additional Requirements: 

• A recognized Thought Leader with excellent communication skills. 

• Ability to create clarity and certainty when there is Architecture ambiguity; communicate to all stakeholders at varying levels within the Organization.

• Ability to weave “Lean”, DevOPs concepts into the fabric of our culture.

• Ability to learn and apply the knowledge of Amazon Services:  Amazon API Gateway, EC2, ECS, Fargate, SQS, SNS, Lambda, AWS RDS (DynamoDB, Postgres, Aurora), CloudFront, Route 53, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudWatch, CloudTrail

• A deep intellectual curiosity and learning agility; stays on the forefront of business and technology solutions, especially API and microservice design, application security, and Front-End / UI development

• Experience in financial services industry, specifically investment management and/or banking is preferred

Special Factors

Sponsorship

Vanguard is not offering visa sponsorship for this position.

About Vanguard

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