Job Description:

Title: VP, Architecture

Location: Remote - USA, Canada

Reports to: Chief Technology Officer

Vacancy: Existing Vacancy

The Role:

JD Power is seeking a senior technology leader to serve as Vice President of Architecture, responsible for defining and governing the enterprise technical architecture across the company's entire engineering organization. This role owns the architectural standards, the NorthStar technical principles, and the architecture review process that ensure consistency, quality, and sound technology decisions as JD Power scales.

JD Power is a Thoma Bravo portfolio company that has grown from $300 million to approximately $900 million in revenue through ten strategic acquisitions since 2019. The largest engineering groups-Autodata Solutions, Autovista Group, and Superior Integrated Solutions / Darwin Automotive-were built on separate technology stacks, tooling, and architectural conventions. You will be responsible for establishing a unified, federated model of architectural governance that balances team autonomy with enterprise consistency.

This is a highly visible, enterprise-level role requiring deep technical expertise across modern application, data, cloud, and platform architecture, combined with the leadership skills to direct both a small team of enterprise architects and a broader guild of architects embedded within the engineering organization. You must be equally effective at setting forward-looking technical strategy and making pragmatic, well-reasoned decisions on real initiatives. A proven track record of leading architecture functions, influencing executive and engineering decision-making, and driving standards adoption in complex, multi-entity environments is essential.

The Impact You Will Have in This Role:

As the VP of Architecture, you will be the driving force behind how JD Power designs, builds, and evolves its technology. By establishing clear architectural standards, a published set of NorthStar principles, and a disciplined architecture review process, you will raise engineering quality, reduce duplicated effort, and accelerate delivery across product lines. You will lead enterprise-level technology decisions-such as the choice of AI tooling, UI stack, customer identity and access management (CIAM), and data platform-and ensure those decisions are consistently adopted. Your leadership of the embedded architect guild will extend that consistency directly into engineering teams, making architecture a strategic enabler of growth rather than a bottleneck.

What You'll Be Doing in This Role:

Architectural Standards & NorthStar Principles

• Own Enterprise Architecture: Consolidate the disparate architectural conventions of acquired entities into a single set of enterprise standards, reference architectures, and playbooks.
• Publish NorthStar Principles: Define, publish, and maintain the NorthStar technical principles-covering front-end frameworks, back-end services, authentication, data platform, and CI/CD-and keep them current as technology evolves.
• Drive Enterprise Technology Decisions: Lead enterprise-level technology choices (e.g., AI tooling, UI stack, CIAM, data platform) with clear rationale, and ensure consistent adoption across all engineering teams.
• Champion Consistency & Reuse: Promote shared component libraries, common patterns, and a consistent look, feel, and engineering experience across all JD Power products.

Architecture Team & Guild Leadership

• Lead the Enterprise Architecture Team: Build, mentor, and direct a small, high-caliber team of enterprise architects responsible for cross-cutting and enterprise-scope initiatives.
• Lead the Architect Guild: Lead the guild of architects embedded within engineering teams under the SVP of Engineering-setting their charter, raising their capability, and aligning their work to enterprise standards while preserving team autonomy.
• Operate a Federated Model: Establish a federated (hybrid) governance model that balances local team ownership of system-level decisions with enterprise consistency on cross-cutting concerns.
• Develop Architecture Talent: Develop architecture talent, define career paths and expectations for architects across the organization, and grow the bench of senior technical leaders.

Architecture Review & Governance

• Establish the Review Process: Design and run a two-tier architecture review process: product-specific reviews led by embedded architects, and enterprise-level reviews led by the enterprise architecture team.
• Chair the Architecture Council: Stand up and lead an architecture council-comprising enterprise, embedded, and TechOps architects-to evaluate initiatives of enterprise scope and resolve cross-cutting design decisions.
• Integrate with Planning: Integrate architecture review into the quarterly planning cadence, with clear triggers, standardized review artifacts, and a documented path for escalation from team-level to enterprise-level review.
• Govern with Transparency: Centralize architecture review artifacts and decisions (e.g., ADRs) so that rationale is transparent, discoverable, and reusable across the organization.

Partnership & Influence

• Partner Across Technology: Partner closely with the SVP of Engineering, the VP of Infrastructure, TechOps, and Security to ensure architecture decisions are practical, secure, and operable.
• Advise Executive Leadership: Provide executive leadership with clear visibility into key architectural decisions, technical risk, and standards adoption across the engineering organization.
• Lead Through Influence: Influence engineering teams toward sound architecture through clarity, credibility, and collaboration rather than mandate alone.

Qualifications of this Role:

• 15+ years of progressive experience in software engineering and technical architecture.
• 5+ years in a VP or Sr. Director architecture leadership role with responsibility for enterprise-wide standards.
• Demonstrated success leading and developing teams of architects, and influencing engineering organizations toward consistent standards.
• Deep, hands-on expertise across modern application architecture, including front-end frameworks (e.g., React), back-end services (e.g., Node.js, Java), and API design.
• Strong experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), data platforms (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake) and medallion/lakehouse data architecture.
• Experience selecting and standardizing enterprise capabilities such as authentication/CIAM (e.g., Auth0, SSO), CI/CD (e.g., GitLab) with DORA instrumentation, and AI/LLM tooling.
• Proven success establishing architecture review processes, governance councils, and decision frameworks (e.g., ADRs) in complex, multi-team environments.
• Track record of defining architecture in multi-entity or post-acquisition environments where consolidation and consistency are required.
• Solid experience with company and team transformation (especially with PE backed enterprises).
• Strong conviction about, and practical experience with, AI-assisted development tools and agentic engineering workflows.
• Exceptional communication and influence skills, with the ability to align engineering leaders and provide strategic counsel to the C-suite.
• Experience operating in private equity-backed or high-growth environments balancing growth with engineering efficiency.
• Experience in data-intensive or analytics-driven businesses, particularly automotive, financial services, or information services sectors (preferred).
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field; advanced degree preferred.

The Hiring Manager says:

"I'm looking for an architect-leader who can bring coherence to a technology landscape built from many acquisitions-without slowing teams down. This role sets our NorthStar: the standards, the principles, and the review process that let every engineering team build with confidence and consistency. You'll lead a small enterprise architecture team and the guild of architects embedded across engineering, own the big enterprise decisions like our AI tooling, UI stack, and CIAM, and make architecture review a value-add part of how we plan and deliver. If you lead through credibility and collaboration, love modern engineering, and want to shape the technical foundation of a growing, data-driven company, this is your role."

This position has a starting salary range of $250,000 - $275,000 CAD/USD per year. This is the range we reasonably and in good faith expect to pay for the role at the time of posting. An employee's pay within the range is determined by a number of factors, including relevant skills, education, qualifications, experience, performance, business or organizational needs, and geographic location.