Enterprise Architect - Houston, TX - Hybrid- CTH USC

Title: Enterprise Architect

Location: Houston, TX

Position: Hybrid (3days onsite/2days remote)

Duration: Contract to hire

About the Role:

The Enterprise Architect is responsible for defining the enterprise architecture vision, guiding principles, standards, target reference architecture models, and the enterprise technology roadmap. This role connects business and technology architecture by creating and maintaining technical capability maps. This role helps ensure that architecture decisions are consistent across the enterprise and that solutions leverage opportunities for common approaches. The Enterprise Architect is expected to analyze industry and market trends and utilize cross-functional knowledge to derive the long-term technology roadmap. The role will work across the organization to drive incubate, assess, and provide innovative new ideas. This role will guide Domain, Platform, and Solution Architects through the standards they set to ensure consistent design and delivery across the organization.

This role will identify emerging technologies and lead development of proof of concepts, evaluate the potential impact on the enterprise technology landscape and roadmap, and effectively communicate findings that lead to proposed changes to key enterprise architecture assets. This role should be well versed in the administration and usage of standard Enterprise Architecture Management tools and draw insights to help manage and optimize the enterprise technology landscape. Lastly, this role will be expected to provide expert opinion as needed in forums such as Technology Innovation Reviews, Architectural Review Board meetings, and other Engineering Reviews, or manage individual architectural contributors who can provide the oversight and guidance necessary to enforce adherence to enterprise architecture standards put in place.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:

• Assess current IT systems and services, research new technologies, and create IT architecture blueprints to help the business and IT achieve their desired outcomes.
• Develop and maintain the enterprise architecture framework that incorporates cloud solutions, applications, data, and security, with an emphasis on the insurance business processes.
• Lead architectural reviews to ensure adherence to best practices, governance standards, and enterprise policies.
• Maintain high-level reference models including the functional architecture, conceptual data architecture, application architecture and the infrastructure strategy.
• Establish and execute architecture management processes including the governance structure (e.g. Architecture Review Board) and processes.
• Understand and communicate strategic themes and other key business drivers for architecture to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Influence common modeling, design, and coding practices.
• Facilitate the reuse of ideas, components, and proven patterns.
• Create, maintain, and communicate reusable enterprise architecture assets.
• Identify areas for improvement in the current systems architecture such as areas of redundancy and develop comprehensive plans to incorporate suggestions into the technology roadmap.
• Serve as a bridge between Domain, Platform, and Solution Architects to ensure all parties are well versed in the defined enterprise architecture strategy, standards, policies, guidelines, and design principles.
• Establish and enforce architecture standards, guidelines, and best practices to ensure consistency and quality across all technology implementations.
• Define and manage the innovation process and support development of a minimum viable product to demonstrate value to key stakeholders.
• Ensure innovative ideas introduced to the enterprise align with established standards and guardrails for the technology landscape.
• Maintain and manage Enterprise Architecture tools and repositories.
• Develop and comprehensively document standards for Domain, Platform, and Solution Architects to refer to when consulting the business on proposed solutions, including all domains of data, cloud / infrastructure, applications / integrations, business architecture, and security.
• Oversee product requirement document (PRD), user experience, design, and code reviews to ensure compliance with enterprise architecture standards.
• Drive and administer the Technology Innovation Review process.
• Consult on use of emerging technologies and enterprise architecture standards to the business as needed.
• Manage the application portfolio across the technology landscape and identify needs for application upgrades and training implementation.
• Drive the Architecture Community of Practice to bring thought leadership, industry trends, and best practices to the enterprise.
• Work effectively within teams and collaborate with key stakeholders to gather requirements relevant to the broader enterprise architecture landscape.