What You'll Be Doing
The Technology Architect provides technical leadership for technology solutions that support product and business outcomes within Stifel's Technology Product Development organization. This role balances functional requirements, non-functional concerns, engineering practices, and enterprise standards within a regulated financial services environment. The Technology Architect guides and enables product engineering teams to make sound technical decisions within established architectural principles, patterns, and guardrails. The role focuses not only on solution design, but also on creating clarity, reducing unnecessary complexity, promoting reuse, mentoring engineers, and enabling teams to deliver with increasing technical autonomy.
What We're Looking For
- Design end-to-end technology solutions aligned with Stifel’s cloud, data, security, platform, and technology strategies.
- Guide and enable product engineering teams to make sound technical design decisions within established architectural principles, patterns, and guardrails.
- Translate business and product needs into clear technical direction, balancing functional and non-functional requirements.
- Partner with product owners, engineers, platform teams, data teams, security, SREs, and other architects throughout the delivery lifecycle.
- Identify, document, promote, and encourage reuse of architectural patterns, practices, technical guidance, and established capabilities before introducing new technology or custom solutions.
- Mentor engineers and Associate Technology Architects by providing the technical context needed to make sound decisions independently.
- Ensure solutions align with modern software engineering practices, including DevOps, CI/CD, observability, resilience, and reliability principles.
- Incorporate enterprise data, analytics, integration, and AI considerations into technology designs where applicable.
- Identify architectural risks, dependencies, tradeoffs, and technical debt, and communicate them clearly to stakeholders.
- Contribute to architecture governance through reusable patterns, documented decisions, and practical guardrails that enable delivery.
- Participate in backlog refinement and planning where architectural guidance improves story readiness and technical decision-making.
- Evaluate and support AI-enabled capabilities and emerging technologies where appropriate.
- Continuously simplify architecture, improve engineering processes, and reduce unnecessary dependencies on the Architecture function.
What You'll Bring
- Strong understanding of APIs, integrations, data persistence, distributed systems, and security fundamentals.
- Working knowledge of DevOps, CI/CD, observability, resilience, and modern software engineering practices.
- Demonstrated ability to evaluate technical tradeoffs and make pragmatic architecture decisions.
- Ability to communicate architecture clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Demonstrated ability to collaborate with and influence engineering teams without relying solely on formal authority.
Education & Experience
- Minimum Required: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Minimum Required: 6+ years of combined experience in software engineering and systems design.
- Preferred: 2+ years in a role with explicit design or architecture responsibility.
- Preferred: Experience designing cloud-based technology solutions with AWS and experience working in Agile or SAFe environments.
Licenses & Credentials
- Preferred: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate.
- Preferred: SAFe Agilist or an equivalent Agile certification.
Systems & Technology
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