VP of Data Architecture

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.

***Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time, including CPT/OPT.***

The Vice President, Data Architecture is responsible for setting and driving Empower’s enterprise data architecture direction to support business growth, modernization, and a secure, scalable technology ecosystem. This role partners with engineering, platform, security, and business leaders to shape architectural decisions that improve stability, performance, time-to-value, and cost efficiency—particularly across Empower’s cloud-first strategy, integration evolution, and API-first integration patterns. This is a senior leadership role focused on architectural outcomes and decision-making, achieved through clear direction, practical guardrails, reusable patterns, and scalable operating practices rather than hands-on implementation. 

What you will do: 

• Lead the enterprise data architecture function, including hiring, developing, and retaining architecture talent, and setting expectations for how architecture work is produced, reviewed, and adopted across delivery organizations. 

• Own Empower’s enterprise data architecture strategy and direction and hold the organization accountable for maintaining the target state, roadmaps, and guidance needed to execute modernization priorities. 

• Direct the architecture team’s definition of enterprise patterns for data movement, processing, storage, and consumption across operational, analytical, and advanced analytics/AI use cases. 

• Communicate enterprise data architecture direction to executives and delivery leaders, making tradeoffs explicit (risk, cost, stability, speed) and driving decisions that improve outcomes. 

• Sponsor and oversee modernization of legacy data capabilities, ensuring the team drives migration sequencing, platform evolution guidance, and decommissioning plans that reduce complexity and technical debt. 

• Partner with platform leadership to advance AWS-based cloud maturity and scalable platform patterns, ensuring the architecture team provides guardrails that enable automation, repeatability, and delivery speed. 

• Own the enterprise approach to integration evolution and reusable integration capabilities, ensuring the team reduces point-to-point complexity and improves enterprise data access through consistent patterns. 

• Ensure the team defines and drives API-first and event-driven patterns (including streaming where appropriate), with clear expectations for latency, scalability, resiliency, and consumer experience. 

• Promotes the creation of architecture that conforms to enterprise standards. 

• Oversee the definition of enterprise consumption standards across BI/reporting, APIs/data services, and analytics workbenches, including performance practices, traceability, and compliance/audit readiness. 

• Sponsor architectural direction for ETL/ELT performance and cost optimization, ensuring the team establishes practices for tuning, workload design, capacity planning, and pipeline reliability instrumentation. 

• Establish an architecture engagement model and operating rhyt