Current Employees of Happen Bank: Please apply via your internal Workday AccountAbout the RoleHappen Bank is seeking a Chief Architect to define and lead the Bank's enterprise architecture strategy, technical standards, and infrastructure architecture. This is a hands-on leadership role, with approximately one-third of the position focused on designing cloud and platform infrastructure, reviewing critical technical decisions, and developing reference architectures that enable Engineering teams to deliver secure, scalable, and reliable solutions.
You'll lead a federated Architecture Guild across business units and directly manage the Shared Architecture team, establishing clear standards, design governance, and alignment across the organization. Working closely with Engineering, Security, Risk, and Regulatory Relations, you'll ensure architecture decisions balance delivery speed, technical quality, and regulatory requirements.
What You'll DoEnterprise Architecture & Governance
- Define and maintain Happen Bank's enterprise target-state architecture, aligning the long-term technical vision with business objectives and the Architecture Guild
- Lead the architecture review process, providing direction and resolving complex cross-domain design decisions while ensuring decisions are documented with clear context, alternatives, and tradeoffs
- Establish and maintain the enterprise technology standards catalog, including approved and retiring patterns, exception processes, and decision-making authority
- Partner with Security, Risk, and Regulatory Relations to ensure architecture decisions incorporate appropriate security, control, and regulatory considerations
Infrastructure & Platform Architecture
- Serve as the Bank's principal infrastructure architect, providing hands-on technical leadership across cloud topology, network segmentation, compute and runtime platforms, resilience, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and cost architecture
- Develop reference architectures, detailed design documents, and working implementations that Engineering teams can adopt, partnering with infrastructure teams to deliver reusable tooling and solutions aligned with security and compliance standards
- Lead architecture for major platform initiatives, including the data platform migration to Databricks, ensuring technical decisions support long-term scalability, reliability, and business needs
Architecture Guild Leadership
- Lead the federated Architecture Guild, establishing recurring design forums, shared standards, cross-team peer reviews, and consistent architecture practices across business units
- Provide functional leadership and mentorship to architects embedded within business-unit Engineering organizations, partnering with Engineering leaders to ensure architectural coverage and alignment between current and future-state designs
- Drive architectural consistency while preserving business-unit autonomy and delivery velocity, using clear standards and guardrails rather than unnecessary approval bottlenecks
- Identify and address architectural debt, duplicated capabilities, and cross-domain design challenges to improve the efficiency and sustainability of the technology environment
People & Organizational Leadership
- Manage, coach, and develop the Shared Architecture team, including Data Architecture, Data Modeling, and Integration Architecture capabilities
- Establish clear priorities, delivery expectations, and accountability for architecture designs, standards, and enablement, recognizing the team's impact extends beyond directly delivered software features
- Foster a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, sound judgment, and continuous improvement across the Shared Architecture team and broader Architecture Guild
About You- 13+ years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, or related technology roles, including 5+ years in a principal, chief, or head-of-architecture position within an organization of comparable complexity
- Bachelor's degree or higher, or equivalent combination of education and experience
- Deep, current, hands-on expertise in infrastructure architecture, including public cloud environments (AWS preferred), networking, identity, containers and orchestration, infrastructure as code, resilience, and disaster recovery
- Demonstrated success providing technical leadership to architects across organizational boundaries, including influencing teams and individuals without direct reporting relationships
- Experience directly managing and developing senior technical individual contributors
- Strong working knowledge of data architecture, data modeling, integration patterns, and modern data platforms, with the technical judgment to review and challenge complex designs
- Experience delivering technology in a regulated financial services environment, including familiarity with OCC, FFIEC, BSA/AML, or equivalent regulatory expectations and their implications for architecture, examinations, and audits
- Proven ability to establish enterprise architecture standards, lead complex design decisions, and balance technical rigor, regulatory requirements, and delivery speed
- Strong technical communication and collaboration skills with the ability to influence Engineering leaders, architects, Security, Risk, and Regulatory Relations partners
- You take ownership of complex technical decisions, apply sound judgment when navigating ambiguity, and establish clear standards that enable teams to operate independently while maintaining architectural consistency
- You build functions that evolve, including how AI can improve architectural design, engineering practices, and technical decision-making. You maintain a high standard for responsible use, data governance, security, and human oversight while helping teams adopt new capabilities thoughtfully
Nice to Have
- Experience leading architecture within a federated, guild, or chapter operating model
- Experience developing architecture patterns that support AI-native workloads and applying AI within enterprise architecture
- Experience defining architecture standards that have successfully supported regulatory examinations
- Experience operating across both large, established institutions and high-velocity product engineering environments
Work Location
San Francisco
The above locations are eligible offices for this role.The locations have been determined to foster in-person collaboration with this roles team or the related business lines. We utilize a hybrid work model, and our teams are in-office Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. In-person attendance is essential for this roles success, and remote placement will not be considered.Happen Bank offers relocation, based on actual job level.
Time Zone Requirements
Local hours (PT)
While the position will primarily work local hours, Happen Bank is headquartered in Pacific Time and our ideal candidate will be flexible working across time zones when necessary.
Travel Requirements
As needed travel to Happen Bank offices and/or other locations, as needed.
Compensation
The target base salary range for this position is 260,000-290,000. The base salary of the role will be determined by job-related knowledge, experience, education, skills, and location. Base salary is just one part of Happen Bank's Total Rewards package. You may also be eligible for long-term awards (equity) and an annual bonus (which is based on company performance, employee performance and eligible earnings).
Were creating new financial services solutions for our members based on fairness, simplicity, and heart, and we treat our employees the same way. We offer a competitive benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision plans for employees and their families, 401(k) match, health and wellness programs, flexible time off policies for salaried employees, up to 16 weeks paid parental leave and more.
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