Team Leader - Architecture Incubation

Why Wellmark : We are a mutual insurance company owned by our policy holders across Iowa and South Dakota, and we’ve built our reputation on over 80 years’ worth of trust. We are not motivated by profits. We are motivated by the well-being of our friends, family, and neighbors–our members. If you’re passionate about joining an organization working hard to put its members first, to provide best-in-class service, and one that is committed to sustainability and innovation, consider applying today! Why Wellmark Technology? Wellmark is building innovative, modern solutions using cutting edge technology. We are driving organizational transformation and business strategy by empowering our technology team to innovate new and elegant solutions to enhance the customer experience. Together, we are leaning into the future, owning the outcome, and driving organizational change to transform how we work. Accountable for leading the incubation of new architecture capabilities at the data center level, turning emerging technologies and architectural concepts into proven, repeatable capabilities that can scale across the enterprise. Leads a team of architects through discovery, experimentation, proof-of-concept development, technical validation, and transition to operational ownership. Establishes clear guardrails, success measures, reference patterns, and adoption pathways so that new infrastructure, platform, data, integration, automation, security, and observability capabilities can be evaluated safely and advanced based on evidence. Partners with data center engineering, infrastructure, security, operations, product, and enterprise architecture leaders to prioritize incubation opportunities, remove barriers, and align experiments with business outcomes, enterprise standards, and long-term technology strategy. Builds an environment that encourages disciplined innovation, rapid learning, technical excellence, and responsible handoff from incubation into production-ready service capabilities. Preferred: Experience in regulated industries (e.g., healthcare, finance) and in environments with rigorous security, resilience, and compliance requirements. Certifications such as TOGAF, AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, or similar architecture and infrastructure credentials. Experience leading technology incubation, proof-of-concepts, pilots, platform engineering, data center modernization, or transition of emerging capabilities into operational services. Required: Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, or related field, or direct and applicable work experience. Minimum 10 years experience in an IT environment with a minimum of 7 years of architecture experience, including advanced knowledge of infrastructure and platform architecture, development methodologies, and solution design. Deep understanding of architecture frameworks, hybrid cloud and on-premises platforms, integration strategies, automation, security, resilience, and data center operations. Prior formal leadership skills typically gained by leading work teams, coaching, mentoring, and facilitating work activities, along with strong relationship management skills. Demonstrated ability to build collaborative and strategic relationships across architecture, data center engineering, infrastructure, security, operations, product, and vendor teams. Proven experience leading architecture teams, formally or informally, and advancing enterprise-scale capabilities from concept through technical validation and operational transition. Ability to think strategically, create clarity in ambiguous spaces, and communicate direction to technical and executive audiences. Stays informed on emerging technology trends and skillsets. Proven experience creating structured experiments, proof-of-concepts, pilots, and learning loops that reduce uncertainty and support evidence-based investment decisions. Encourages teams to surface assumptions, test them quickly, and resolve challenges. Ability to translate long-range technology goals into prioritized incubation themes, capability roadmaps, decision points, and executable plans. Effective consulting, critical thinking, systems thinking, and problem-solving skills. Uses data, technical evidence, risk analysis, and sound judgment to recommend whether capabilities should be advanced, revised, paused, or retired. Demonstrated success influencing at all levels of the organization. Builds trust, alignment, commitment, and action across teams that own architecture, engineering, cybersecurity, operations, service management, finance, and procurement. Prior experience defining and measuring incubation outcomes, including technical feasibility, security and compliance readiness, operability, reliability, scalability, cost, supportability, and adoption potential. Proven ability to adapt to unexpected changes or situations and work effectively across evolving structures, processes, requirements, and cultures. Experience with architecture in a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) environment, supporting Agile Release Trains and aligning incubation work with Lean-Agile principles. Travel required up to 5%. a. Lead with a focus on disciplined innovation and empowered teams. Coach and mentor architects as they explore new capabilities, develop hypotheses, design experiments, interpret results, and communicate recommendations. Build a culture that balances speed of learning with security, reliability, compliance, and operational accountability. Align staffing, vendor support, laboratory capacity, and funding with the highest-value incubation priorities. b. Build and govern a data center architecture incubation practice. Establish a transparent intake and prioritization process for new capability ideas. Define stage gates from discovery through proof-of-concept, pilot, production readiness, and operational handoff. Ensure each incubation effort has a clear problem statement, sponsor, scope, assumptions, success measures, risks, decision rights, and exit criteria. c. Make the data center a proving ground for future-ready architecture capabilities. Guide the evaluation of emerging infrastructure, hybrid cloud, platform, network, storage, compute, automation, observability, resilience, security, data, and integration approaches. Ensure experiments are isolated appropriately, aligned with enterprise standards, and designed to generate reusable learning rather than one-off demonstrations. d. Convert validated learning into reusable architecture assets. Oversee the development of reference architectures, capability models, patterns, standards, guardrails, decision records, test results, implementation guidance, and operational readiness criteria. Ensure artifacts clearly describe where a capability fits, when to use it, known constraints, dependencies, cost implications, and the path to broader adoption. e. Create a reliable transition from incubation to enterprise capability. Partner with engineering, infrastructure, cybersecurity, operations, service management, product, and business leaders to define ownership, funding, support models, skills, controls, migration approaches, and adoption plans. Prevent successful pilots from stalling by establishing handoff expectations early and confirming production readiness before scale-out. f. Incubate modern data and integration capabilities at the platform level. Evaluate API-first architectures, event-driven integration, scalable data platforms, AI/ML enablement, and self-service access patterns in the context of data center and hybrid environments. Validate data integrity, security, performance, resilience, interoperability, observability, and operational support before recommending enterprise adoption. g. Maintain an active pipeline of architecture experiments. Scout relevant technology trends, frame opportunities against enterprise needs, and run focused proof-of-concepts that answer specific technical and business questions. Use evidence from experiments to recommend investment, refinement, standardization, or retirement. Share outcomes broadly so that both successful and unsuccessful experiments accelerate organizational learning. h. Manage architecture incubation resources and outcomes. Balance architects and enabling engineering resources across experiments, contribute to strategic planning and budgeting, manage vendor participation, and prioritize investments based on potential value, risk reduction, feasibility, and readiness. Report the incubation portfolio, decisions, learning, risks, and transition status to technology leadership. i. Other duties as assigned. All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines. An Equal Opportunity Employer The policy of Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield is to recruit, hire, train and promote individuals in all job classifications without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, veteran status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other characteristic protected by law. Applicants requiring a reasonable accommodation due to a disability at any stage of the employment application process should contact us at careers@wellmark.com Please inform us if you meet the definition of a " Covered DoD official ". At this time, Wellmark is not considering applicants for this position that require any type of immigration sponsorship (additional work authorization or permanent work authorization) now or in the future to work in the United States. This includes, but IS NOT LIMITED TO: F1-OPT, F1-CPT, H-1B, TN, L-1, J-1, etc. For additional information around work authorization needs please refer to the following resources: Nonimmigrant Workers and Green Card for Employment-Based Immigrants Wellmark supports and expects the responsible use of AI for our workforce! We welcome the responsible use of these tools by job seekers as well and are interested in learning from you; you will have an opportunity in the application process to share which tools you used and how you applied them.