Principal Enterprise Architect

Navy Federal Credit Union currently does not provide sponsorship for this role. Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for current or future sponsorship. We are seeking a seasoned Enterprise Architect to provide strategic architecture leadership across business and technology portfolios. This role focuses on translating enterprise strategy, business priorities, and operating models into coherent, secure, and scalable technology architectures that enable durable, long-term business value. The Enterprise Architect plays a key role in operationalizing enterprise strategy by aligning architecture decisions and technology investments to core strategic pillars, including delivering a unified, member-centric experience across channels and advancing modern, flexible, and secure technology platforms. This role partners closely with business and product owners, engineering, and technology leaders to shape current- and future-state architectures, guide modernization initiatives, and ensure alignment with enterprise standards, regulatory obligations, and transformation objectives. The role bridges strategy to execution through clear architecture direction and advisory services. Own and evolve enterprise architecture direction across assigned business and technology portfolios, ensuring alignment with enterprise strategic priorities. Translate enterprise strategy, operating models, and capability roadmaps into target-state, transition, and reference architectures. Align architecture outcomes to key strategic and business portfolios, supporting modern architecture and platform evolution, including core modernization, scalable and AI-enabled services. Partner with business and technology leadership to shape architectures that balance member/team member experience, operational efficiency, risk, and sustainability. Develop and maintain architecture artifacts and Portfolio Architecture Blueprints, capturing viewpoints including current-state, target-state, and transition architecture, capability maps, system and process diagrams, and architecture decision records. Provide forward-thinking technical expertise and thought leadership in current and emerging technologies, development practices, market trends and best practices Guide modernization initiatives involving major legacy modernization and cloud adoption efforts, support automation, and digital enablement in alignment with strategic growth and scalability objectives. Define, apply, and govern enterprise architecture standards, patterns, and principles to ensure consistency and reuse across initiatives. Participate in architecture reviews and governance forums, assessing solution integrity, scalability, security, resiliency, and compliance. Identify architectural risks, constraints, and dependencies; provide clear recommendations and trade-offs to stakeholders. Anticipate regulatory, compliance, security, and operational considerations impacting technology solutions and business capabilities. Provide thought leadership on industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices to inform enterprise strategy and investment decisions. Collaborate with multi-disciplinary architects and engineers to ensure stakeholder alignment and coherence across portfolios and enterprise initiatives. Build strong relationships with business leaders, product teams, technology partners, vendors, and external stakeholders. Extensive experience serving as an Enterprise Architect supporting large-scale, complex business domains within regulated environments. Proven ability to communicate and influence business and technology leadership with enterprise architectural concepts and practices effectively. Experience working with or architecting FinTech solutions and ecosystems, including digital payments, embedded finance, open banking, digital wallets, real-time payments, stablecoins, blockchain-enabled platforms, and financial data exchange frameworks. Familiarity with emerging financial technology trends, FinTech operating models, and strategic partnerships between financial institutions and FinTech providers, with the ability to assess their impact on enterprise architecture, business capabilities, and technology strategy. Experience guiding modernization initiatives, including cloud and hybrid architecture adoption (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS). Proficiency in facilitating discussions, interviews, review and validation of architecture designs by stakeholders, leaders and peers. Demonstrated experience aligning technology architecture with technology strategy and enterprise transformation objectives. Proven ability to translate enterprise strategy, operational needs, and regulatory requirements into clear, actionable architecture designs and roadmaps. Experience architecting solutions across enterprise architecture domains including application, integration, data, infrastructure, and security. Strong ability to lead architecture discussions and influence both technical and non-technical audiences, including executive stakeholders. Experience performing system, process, and fit-gap analysis. Strong analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills in matrixed organizations. Desired Qualifications Master’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field. Enterprise architecture certifications (e.g., TOGAF, SAFe, ITIL, COBIT) or equivalent experience. Cloud architecture certifications (e.g., Azure, AWS) preferred. Experience supporting enterprise transformation initiatives across multiple business domains within regulated financial institutions. Strong working knowledge of banking and financial services industry standards, operating models, and best practices (e.g., retail banking, lending, payments, digital channels). Familiarity with U.S. financial regulations and compliance frameworks, including BSA/AML, privacy, and data protection requirements (e.g., CCPA, GDPR). Working knowledge of credit union functions, member-centric operating models, and core business processes. Experience navigating governance, risk, and compliance considerations, including audit, controls, and regulatory engagement. Experience working within Agile, product-aligned, and DevSecOps delivery models. Familiarity with enterprise architecture governance, architecture review boards, and decision frameworks. Additional Information Hours: Monday - Friday, 8:00AM - 4:30PM Locations: 820 Follin Lane, Vienna, VA 22180