Principal Solution Architect, Enterprise API Platform

The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 152,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Guardian Life seeks a Principal Solution Architect to define, scale, and govern enterprise-wide architecture across platforms, domains, and delivery teams. This role shapes how technology solutions are designed, integrated, secured, and operated consistently across the organization, partnering with business and technology stakeholders.

Located in the Guardian office network with a hybrid schedule, you will drive architectural patterns, guardrails, and reusable designs to enable teams to deliver

Qualifications

• Deep experience designing and governing enterprise-scale solution architectures across multiple teams and domains.
• Experience modernizing API ecosystems, including API management platforms and lifecycle patterns.
• Strong ability to translate strategy into architectural direction and concrete patterns.
• Experience collaborating with business and technology stakeholders to deliver scalable, secure solutions.

Responsibilities

• Own and shape enterprise or business solution architecture strategy, standards, and patterns across platforms and domains.
• Define and maintain reference architectures and reusable design patterns for solution delivery.
• Establish architectural guardrails that enable scalable, secure, and consistent design across teams.
• Lead enterprise-level design decisions for high-impact initiatives spanning multiple value streams.
• Provide architectural oversight to ensure alignment to enterprise standards and long-term strategy.
• Translate business and technology strategy into actionable architecture direction and designs.

Skills

Enterprise-scale architecture

API modernization

Governance & security

Agile delivery models

Job description

Position Overview

Principal Solution Architect, Enterprise API Platform Position Overview: The Principal Solution Architect, Enterprise API Platform, is responsible for defining, scaling, and governing enterprise-wide or business solution architecture across platforms, domains, and delivery teams. This role shapes how technology solutions are designed, integrated, secured, and operated consistently across the organization. While architecture is foundational, the Principal Solution Architect will be responsible for designing solutions in close collaboration with the business and technology stakeholders. Where applicable, the role will be accountable to build solutions that scale and align to business and technology requirements. Operating at an enterprise or portfolio level, the Principal Solution Architect focuses less on individual solution delivery and more on establishing architecture patterns, standards, guardrails and building solutions that enable teams to deliver high-quality, scalable, and secure solutions at speed. This role operates within a federated Enterprise Architecture (EA) model, partnering closely with business technology and platform teams to shape solutions in real time while improving accountability, speed, and delivery alignment. The architect remains connected to the central EA core through enterprise standards, governance, communities of practice, and cross-functional collaboration to ensure consistent, risk-aware technology decisions across domains. This role partners closely with Enterprise Architecture, Engineering, Product, Cybersecurity, and Platform teams to ensure solutions align to business strategy, are resilient and compliant, and can scale across multiple use cases—without becoming a bottleneck to delivery.

You Will (Key Responsibilities)

• Own and shape enterprise or business solution architecture strategy, standards, and patterns across multiple platforms and domains.
• Define and maintain reference architectures and reusable design patterns (“golden paths”) for solution delivery.
• Establish architectural guardrails that enable scalable, secure, and consistent solution design across teams.
• Own reusable solution patterns, reference architectures, golden paths, and cross-team design consistency.
• Work with Solution Architects to drive adoption; Head of Portfolio Architecture to tailor for BU context; Principal Enterprise Architect to align with enterprise standards.
• Lead enterprise-level or business-level design decisions for complex, high-impact initiatives that span multiple value streams or business units.
• Provide architectural oversight and guidance across portfolios, ensuring alignment to enterprise standards and long-term strategy.
• Drive early engagement on initiatives to identify cross-platform dependencies, systemic risks, and scalability constraints.
• Partner with Enterprise Architecture and platform teams to define build vs. buy guidance and integration patterns.
• Translate business and technology strategy into actionable architecture direction and solution designs.
• Partner with Security, Risk, and Compliance teams to embed governance, security, and regulatory requirements into solution architecture.
• Define and promote best practices for operational resilience, scalability, performance, and maintainability.
• Escalate enterprise exceptions / non-standard patterns / enterprise-risk decisions.
• Influence and align stakeholders across engineering, product, and business leadership without direct authority.
• Mentor and coach architects and senior engineers to elevate architectural maturity across the organization.
• Represent solution architecture in enterprise forums, architecture review boards, and strategic technology discussions.
• Influences Value Stream leaders, Product managers, Product Owners and Tech Leads to align roadmaps, MVP scope, and technical trade-offs.
• Where applicable, the role will be accountable to build solutions that scale and align to business and technology requirements.
• Available for production incidents with major impact to business operations.
• Balance strategic and tactical decisions across API modernization, API/MCP management, API lifecycle management, domain-aligned data models, reimplementation priorities, and AI-ready API capabilities.
• Continuously evaluate now versus later, strategic versus tactical, reusable versus disposable, and modernization versus value delivery, ensuring meaningful outcomes through thin slices rather than broad, low-value transformation efforts.
• Lead enterprise API architecture patterns, technical direction, and modernization alignment across API platform engineering, internal API delivery, external API delivery, and high-impact integration initiatives.
• Drive API rationalization, reuse, and domain alignment by helping teams redesign APIs around business capability-based, domain-aligned data models and solve common problems once rather than repeatedly.
• Guide reimplementation decisions for APIs coupled to non-performant or non-scalable data sources, balancing resiliency, scalability, maintainability, delivery urgency, and longer-term architectural direction.
• Help shape Guardian’s API, MCP gateway, and context-layer strategy so APIs become trusted, discoverable, observable, and governed inputs into agentic AI, reusable business capabilities, and future AI-native experiences.
• Serve as a critical daily and weekly architecture input to the Head of Enterprise API Platform, improving decision quality, decision velocity, modernization sequencing, and executive confidence in API transformation progress.
• Translate complex API architecture decisions into business outcomes, helping senior technology and business leaders understand “what this means” in terms of value, risk, scalability, execution, AI enablement, and strategic platform direction.

Required Qualifications

• Deep experience designing and governing enterprise-scale solution architectures across multiple teams and domains.
• Experience modernizing API ecosystems, including API management platforms, API lifecycle platforms, gateway patterns, integration patterns, performance and scalability improvements, and domain-aligned API design.
• Proven ability to define and drive adoption of architecture standards, frameworks, and reusable patterns.
• Strong understanding of modern technology ecosystems (application architectures, APIs and delivery, integration patterns, AI, cloud platforms, and data flows).
• Experience balancing business priorities, technical trade-offs, and risk at an enterprise level.
• Demonstrated ability to operate at both strategic and hands‑on levels when needed.
• Strong experience influencing technical direction across distributed teams without direct reporting authority.
• Ability to bridge business and technology, translating strategy into clear architectural direction.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to convey complex concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience working in regulated or risk-sensitive environments with strong awareness of governance and compliance needs.
• Track record of mentoring architects and engineers and elevating organizational capabilities.
• Experience collaborating within Agile / product-based delivery models.
• Experience producing product-level and team-level technical design documentation.
• Strong engineering background with the ability to operate as a credible technical partner to engineering leaders while also shaping enterprise-level API architecture strategy.
• Demonstrated ability to balance pragmatic delivery with disruptive architectural thinking, including sequencing modernization work around prioritized strategic initiatives, high‑visibility outcomes, and critical high‑transaction‑volume integrations.
• Strong understanding of MCP, agentic AI enablement, context-layer architecture, API observability, discoverability, governance, security, and the role of APIs as foundational inputs into AI-native enterprise capabilities.

Location

Three days a week at a Guardian office in Holmdel, NJ, New York, NY or Bethlehem, PA.

Salary

Salary Range: $152,290.00 - $250,195.00. The salary range reflected above is a good faith estimate of base pay for the primary location of the position. The salary for this position ultimately will be determined based on the education, experience, knowledge, and abilities of the successful candidate. In addition to salary, this role may also be eligible for annual, sales, or other incentive compensation.

Our Promise

At Guardian, you’ll have the support and flexibility to achieve your professional and personal goals. Through skill-building, leadership development and philanthropic opportunities, we provide opportunities to build communities and grow your career, surrounded by diverse colleagues with high ethical standards. Inspire Well-Being As part of Guardian’s Purpose – to inspire well‑being – we are committed to offering contemporary, supportive, flexible, and inclusive benefits and resources to our colleagues.

Benefits

Explore our company benefits at www.guardianlife.com/careers/corporate/benefits. Benefits apply to full‑time eligible employees. Interns are not eligible for most Company benefits.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Equal Employment Opportunity Guardian is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to age, race, color, creed, religion, sex, affectional or sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, marital status, disability, military or veteran status, or any other classification protected by applicable law.

Accommodations

Guardian is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment, its services, programs, and activities. Guardian also provides reasonable accommodations to qualified job applicants (and employees) to accommodate the individual's known limitations related to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, unless doing so would create an undue hardship. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please contact [e-mail]. Please note: this resource is for accommodation requests only.

Visa Sponsorship

Guardian Life is not currently or in the foreseeable future sponsoring employment-based visas (e.g., such as an H‑1B). In order to be a successful applicant, you must be legally authorized to work in the United States, without the need for employer sponsorship/support now or at any time in the future.

Artificial Intelligence in Recruitment

As part of Guardian’s job application process, Guardian may use artificial intelligence tools (“AI Tools”) to automate the sorting and filtering of information provided by applicants as part of its preliminary screening. This preliminary screening may be used to help identify applicant materials and resumes relative to their indication that the applicant meets the requirements for the specific job for which they are applying, as specified in the listing posted on Guardian’s jobs website (Careers at Guardian at https://www.guardianlife.com/careers). At Guardian, we do not use AI Tools to substantially assist or replace human judgment or discretionary decision making in our hiring process. All hiring decisions will be made by Guardian colleagues. Please be aware that if you apply for a specific position with Guardian, you will have the choice of opting out of Guardian’s use of AI Tools during the job application process. If you would like to request an alternative process that does not utilize AI Tools or would like to request a reasonable accommodation, within ten business days of your position application, you must email your request to [e-mail], making sure to provide your name and job requisition identification number. Guardian will retain your applicant materials and resume and all information therefrom in accordance with Guardian’s document retention policy, a copy of which you may request via [e-mail]. Additionally, at applicable times, Guardian will make public the most recent bias audit results for such AI tools, which may be found here.

Guardian Overview

Every day, Guardian helps our 29 million customers realize their dreams through a range of insurance and financial products and services. Our Purpose, to inspire well-being, guides our dedication to the colleagues, consumers, and communities we serve. We know that people count, and we go above and beyond to prepare them for the life they want to live, focusing on their overall well-being — mind, body, and wallet. As one of the largest mutual insurance companies, we put our customers first. Behind every bright future is a GuardianTM.