System Architect Director – Data Platform Engineering

You have a clear vision of where your career can go. And we have the leadership to help you get there. At CNA, we strive to create a culture in which people know they matter and are part of something important, ensuring the abilities of all employees are used to their fullest potential. 

The System Architect (SA) Director has overall technical authority for one or more programs/Agile Release Trains (ARTs) within a portfolio, hands on leader with direct management accountability for a staff of Engineers. The SA Director works closely with an Enterprise Architect, Product Management and Release Train Engineer (RTE) to ensure ongoing alignment of technical and business outcomes. They also work with Technical Architects, as needed, to ensure architectural outcomes are within required guardrails. The SA Director owns the creation, maintenance and communication of the Architectural Runway, along with oversight through implementation by one or more development teams. The SA Director is an expert and champion of Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) architectural design and development, incrementally building the associated mindset and behaviors across stakeholders with which they work.

JOB DESCRIPTION:

Essential Duties & Responsibilities 

Performs a combination of duties in accordance with departmental guidelines: 

 

• Builds and continually refines detailed Architectural Runway and Vision, and Enabler Epics in collaboration with various stakeholders, for data platform engineering team. 

• Define and lead implementation, advancements of Data Platform Engineering, based on requirements, scalability, performance, and security considerations. Partner with enterprise architecture and define a clear roadmap for the platform's evolution, aligning it with the organization's strategic goals. 

• Lead the design and execution of AI-driven Frameworks to enable migration of data marts from on-premises platforms to cloud environments. This includes leveraging advanced AI capabilities for reverse engineering, forward engineering optimized cloud-native architectures, and automating schema mapping, transformation logic, and validation processes.  

• Responsible for designing, building, and maintaining scalable, secure, and cost-efficient cloud data platforms, including architecture planning, migration strategies, performance optimization, governance, and integration of AI-driven automation for data engineering workflows. 

• Implement FinOps practices, including tuning and usage monitoring to ensure cost efficiency across data platforms 

• Ensure platform security and compliance by implementing robust identity and access management, encryption, and data protection measures. 

• Contributes to and influences the program increment roadmap, backlog and prepares architectural outcomes for program increment planning. 

• Incrementally builds and shepherds the scaled agility mindset, values, principles, and practices across teams, ARTs. 

• Owns measurable velocity, specifically around overcoming hurdles, implementing new designs, and implementing best practices. 

• Guides and negotiates with Developers/Engineers, Tech Product Manager/Owner, RTE, and Enterprise Architect to ensure architectural alignment. 

• Actively engages in all ART events, collaborating, coaching and guiding stakeholders to ensure ongoing alignment with the Architectural Vision. 

• Influences and creates the ongoing Enabler Epics for maintaining and stabilizing all ART applications and pipelines, including upgrades of technology, frameworks, and infrastructure. 

• Has full manag