Principal Architect - Investment Services

USAA Life Insurance Company; San Antonio (TX); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

USAA Life Insurance Company seeks a Principal Technical Architect to steer investments technology strategy within the Architecture and Technology Strategy organization. You will lead core architectural decisions, partnering with senior business and IT leaders to drive innovation and ensure regulatory compliance across on-prem and cloud environments.

Role requires designing scalable systems using microservices, containerization and secure APIs, while mentoring engineers and coordinating

Qualifications

• Experience leading architecture for complex investment/financial services applications.
• Strong knowledge of modern architectural patterns (microservices, APIs, event-driven designs).
• Ability to communicate architecture decisions to executives and stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Collaborates with business and IT stakeholders to finalize strategy and requirements.
• Coordinates with domain architects to create architecture decisions and roadmaps.
• Mentors engineers and architects to build resilient systems.
• Reviews domain applications to identify risks and opportunities.
• Advises executives on proposed courses of action and prepares CTO briefings.
• Documents architecture standards and policies across domains for compliance.
• Participates in planning and troubleshooting incidents in the technology ecosystem.
• Provides mentorship and guidance to ensure team redundancy and backfill capacity.
• Leads technical design of systems, services and dataflows across portfolios.
• Executes architecture practices to deliver timely, high-quality artifacts.
• Maintains external relationships with industry organizations and vendors.

Skills

Stakeholder collaboration

Architecture leadership

Mentorship

Risk assessment

Executive communication

Job description

Why USAA?

At USAA, our mission is to empower our members to achieve financial security through highly competitive products, exceptional service and trusted advice. We seek to be the #1 choice for the military community and their families.

Embrace a fulfilling career at USAA, where our core values - honesty, integrity, loyalty and service - define how we treat each other and our members. Be part of what truly makes us special and impactful.

We are proud to support active-duty military spouses. USAA roles may offer remote or hybrid flexibility for active-duty military spouses consistent with applicable policy and business needs.

The Opportunity

USAA is seeking a Principal Technical Architect to lead the technology direction for the Investments Services line of business. The candidate selected for this position will be working as a principal technical architect within USAA's Architecture and Technology Strategy organization. This team is responsible for researching and ushering the Investments technology stack into the next 100 years of service to USAA members. The selected candidate will be part of a team of highly skilled staff and principal architects who are experts in designing systems and applications utilizing technologies that run the gamut from on-premise mainframe to IaaS/PaaS/SaaS in the cloud. This includes designing core business applications using principles such as app containerization, microservices and event-driven architectures, data/analytics-driven design, secure APIs, and architectural resiliency - all while understanding and designing for the regulatory compliance demands of the retail investments industry. Key projects may include, but are not limited to, core vendor technology acquisition and integration, member experience and process design, fraud guardrails implementation, application future-proofing, and data-centric integration efforts with numerous business and IT stakeholders. Partnering with senior business and technology leaders, you will establish architecture standards and platform roadmaps that accelerate innovation, drive adoption, and deliver business value through technology.

We offer a flexible work environment that requires an individual to be in the office 4 days per week. This position can be based in one of the following locations: San Antonio, TX, Plano, TX, Charlotte, NC or Phoenix, AZ. Relocation assistance is available for this position.

What you'll do:

• Collaborates with business and IT stakeholders to understand and finalize strategy, requirements, measures, risks and controls across multiple domains considering cross stream impacts.
• Utilizes expertise and research to coordinate with domain architects in the creation of technology decisions with relevant architecture artifacts and proactively apply architecture thinking to conceive evolutionary strategies and roadmaps that can accelerate current capabilities across multiple business functions or IT domains.
• Cultivates productive and trusted relationships with front line business executives and IT stakeholders, to provide leadership and guidance to influence and shape priority, funding and execution of architecture solutions and direction for multiple domains and/or portfolios.
• Executes and assists in review of formal assessment of domain applications in collaboration with business and application owners to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and risks.
• Advises executive level business owners of proposed courses of action; Provides assessment summary content to the CTO for presentation to the board.
• Defines and documents architecture standards, principles, and policies for and across multiple domains to ensure architectural compliance of technology solutions.
• Use risk assessment methodologies to draft/evaluate and approve/reject waivers to architecture standards.
• Participates in activities that support the USAA technology ecosystem such as Program Increment planning and assistance in troubleshooting of Availability Command Center incidents to resolve complex production issues related to multiple technology domains.
• Provides professional and technical mentorship for experienced architects, engineers and IT community colleagues in an open, respectful, flexible and empathetic manner. Recommends mentoring opportunities specifically to create team redundancy and backfill ability.
• Leads the technical design and definition of systems, services, and dataflows across multiple domains and/or portfolios.
• Executes architecture practices and processes by ensuring timely completion of deliverables, driving and sponsoring enhancements.
• Mantains external relationships with contacts on industry organizations and government boards and vendors in the marketplace related to a business function or technology domain.
• Achieves one or more of the following external eminence activities: obtaining professional and industry technical certifications, presenting at conferences, publishing technical papers, contributin