Join the People Helping People

Velera is the nation’s premier payments credit union service organization (CUSO) and an integrated fintech solutions provider. The company serves more than 4,000 financial institutions throughout North America, operating with velocity to help our clients keep pace with the rapid momentum of change and fuel growth in the new era of financial services. Our purpose: We accelerate partners’ success through innovative financial technology solutions and inspired service.

The Opportunity

The Senior Enterprise Architect (EA) is a senior strategic technology leader responsible for aligning business strategy with enterprise-wide architectural direction. The role provides vision, governance, and oversight across business, application, data, technology, and security domains to ensure Velera’s capabilities evolve cohesively, securely, and sustainably.

The Sr. EA works closely with executives, Strategic Portfolio Managers (SPMs), Portfolio Managers (PMs), and Product leadership to evaluate new ideas, shape strategic demand, and translate early concepts into actionable architectural deliverables.

Through structured discovery engagements, the Sr EA transforms business ideas into statements of architecture that define architectural epics, high-level estimates, architecture tiers (1, 2, or 3), required standards, and architectural building blocks.

The Sr EA acts as the strategic bridge between SPM/PM (strategy) and Solution Architects (technical solution) by providing SAs with the architectural requirements, context, and constraints needed to design scalable, secure, and compliant solutions. This role oversees the enterprise continuum, architecture repository, capability models, roadmaps, and governance processes to ensure alignment across teams and adherence to enterprise standards.

This position demands deep technical breadth, business acumen, enterprise modeling expertise, exceptional communication skills, and the ability to influence senior stakeholders while elevating architectural maturity across the organization.

Day In The Life

Strategic Architecture, Planning & Governance

• Define and maintain enterprise-wide architecture vision, standards, principles, and reference models.
• Ensure alignment of enterprise architecture with organizational strategy, capability maturity priorities, and multi-year roadmaps.
• Govern architecture compliance through ARB, PTB, PTO, and other architectural oversight frameworks.
• Maintain and evolve the enterprise architecture repository and the enterprise continuum.

Portfolio Discovery, Demand Shaping & Architectural Intake

• Partner with Strategic Portfolio Managers (SPMs) and Portfolio Managers (PMs) during Discovery Sessions to translate business ideas into structured architectural concepts.
• Create Statements of Architecture capturing:
  • Architectural epics
  • Architectural stakeholders
  • Architectural dependencies
  • High-level estimate ranges
  • Architecture categories (Tier 1, 2, or 3)
  • Standards, patterns, and required architectural building blocks in scope for the “project”
• Ensure architectural decisions and constraints are documented early to reduce downstream risk and enhance delivery predictability.
• Provide SPMs and PMs with data-driven architectural insights supporting prioritization, investment decisions, and portfolio planning.
• Partnering with enablement/intake, act as the architectural authority, determining what must escalate to Solution Architecture, Platform Engineering, or the Architecture Review Board.

Bridge Between Strategy and Solution Architecture

• Serve as the strategic handoff point between SPM/PM and Solution Architects:
  • EAs define enterprise direction and architectural requirements
  • SAs design technical solutions within those boundaries

Business, Data, Application & Technology Architecture

• Partnering with Center of Excellence/Business Process Team, perform business capability modeling, gap analysis, value stream analysis, and business scenario development.
• Expand and mature the enterprise data architecture footprint and its relationships to business and application architectures.
• Develop architecture artifacts including matrices, diagrams, principles, architecture building blocks, and future-state mode