Vice President - Foundational Business Principal Architect

Location Designation : Hybrid - 3 days per week

When you join New York Life, you’re joining a company that values career development, collaboration, innovation, and inclusiveness.

We want employees to feel proud about being part of a company that is committed to doing the right thing. You’ll have the opportunity to grow your career while developing personally and professionally through various resources and programs.

New York Life is a relationship-based company and appreciates how both virtual and in-person interactions support our culture.

At the heart of New York Life is a commitment to be there for our customers when they need us whether today or decades into the future.

We have delivered on that promise for over 175 years by investing wisely, growing a portfolio of strategic businesses, and remaining true to our mission as a mutual company, accountable only to our customers, not to outside investors.

For our customers, that means having the confidence that comes with knowing they can build a better future for themselves and those they love.

As a mutual, we are fully aligned with our policy owners, not with outside investors or Wall Street. This allows us to focus on delivering lifelong value to our clients, including sharing our success with eligible participating policy owners through non-guaranteed dividends, which we've paid for 166 consecutive years.

People come to work at New York Life to contribute to the financial goals of millions of families and businesses each day.

We have a diverse, nationwide workforce that allows us to support the communities where we work. Our purpose-driven mind-set has attracted people who want to do good and has resulted in great success for our company and our customers.

Over the past 179 years, New York Life has provided financial security and peace of mind to clients across the United States through a dedicated career agency distribution model men and women who provide insurance and financial solutions to their local communities.

The market for insurance and financial solutions is evolving rapidly, driven by changes in customer expectations, the economic environment, and the competitive landscape.

This changing marketplace provides tailwinds that New York Life can capitalize on to drive growth, and headwinds that we must actively address to enhance resiliency.

As a result, the way we approach go-to-market must evolve.

We undertook a significant step in this direction by evolving to the value stream operating model last year. Our vision is to be a leading provider of human-led holistic guidance to affluent and middle markets enabled by seamless and differentiated experiences across solutions and channels that is differentiated from the broader financial services industry.

The principles of the philosophy will permeate all our interactions with prospects and clients. With visibility into their full financial picture, a tailored holistic financial plan, and the agent’s expertise, prospects will have a clear understanding of solutions needed to help them both protect and prosper.

They will be able to apply for multiple solutions to seamlessly address their broad set of financial needs. Enabled by a comprehensive view of their finances, clients will have periodic reviews with their agents to assess progress against goals.

They will have the flexibility to manage accounts and transactions quickly across our full solution suite in one place through their preferred channel.

We will invest in experience enhancements across multiple constituents (e.g., clients, new agents, top advisors, field managers, service professionals).

We will be easy to do business with and bring to fore our collective and unified strength, enhancing our position as the preferred destination for both agents and clients.

Role Summary :

The Principal Architect for the Foundational Business (FB) is a critical leadership position that is at the center of the business and technology transformation.

The role will proactively and holistically engage with the FB Experience team and Product Managers, key business leaders of FB Value Streams, Data / Technology leaders, and Value Stream architects in leading and supporting strategic architecture activities and decisions that guide horizontal solutions to enable the organization’s future-state business capabilities and associated target architecture.

More specifically, this role will focus on identifying and designing universal or cross value stream capabilities that can be built once and reused within multiple business functions and agent / client experiences.

This role will provide the change leadership required to shift to a mindset of enabling and orchestrating the delivery of targeted business outcomes and value through;

influencing business process optimization, creating discipline around an effective approach to solution discovery and driving architecture that balances Value Stream autonomy to deliver and reuse of core technical assets that drive cost efficiencies, along with connectedness within our experience layer.

The role requires superior verbal and non-verbal communication and analytics skills to ensure that all aspect of the business opportunities and needs are met.

Key Responsibilities :

• Works closely with FB Experience team and Product Managers, key business leaders of FB Value Streams, Data / Technology leaders, and Value Stream architects to achieve FB outcomes.
• Create and maintain inventory and designs of current state universal capabilities supporting the FB and value streams.
• Create an integrated view of end state architecture and align on target-state universal capabilities and corresponding architectural designs that ensures the strategic alignment of the 6 VS architecture roadmaps come together to enable the horizontal end to end experiences.

Identify and frame opportunities for consolidation / simplification of legacy technologies, data stores, and applications.

• Participate and influence the creation and maintenance of a FB integrated, multi-year Business / Data / Technology roadmap that aligns with the goals of the FB and identifies opportunities to build universal capability, while focusing on technical ecosystem simplification, scalability, modernization, and decommissioning opportunities.
• Break down work needed to build universal capability and deploy into value stream delivery teams. Engages in complex initiatives, guiding teams on effectively identifying and resolving cross value stream dependencies.
• Deploy governance and conceptual solution architectures within the agile delivery processes to support execution against roadmap.
• Reinforce product mindset throughout the Value Stream to focus on the rapid delivery of value to agents and customers.
• Design solutions that meet the business and technology objectives of the FB following the established policies, standards, and patterns in partnership with the Value Stream architects and technical centers of enablement.
• Design and present innovative and cost-effective solutions to the FB drawing on the current technology landscape and industry best practices to enable seamless experiences for our clients and agents.
• A strong focus on the customer and connected experience to drive the productivity of end users.

Education :

Master’s or bachelor’s degree in business, computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, system analysis or a related field of study, or equivalent experience.

Experience & Required Skills :

• 15-20 or more years of business experience in strategic architecture and / or delivery roles
• Fifteen or more years of experience in at least three disciplines, such as business, information, solution or technical architecture, application development, middleware, information analysis, database management or operations in a multitier environment, and legacy systems.
• Deep industry domain knowledge of the business and its operating environment.
• Broad experience across individual life, annuity, long term care, disability and wealth management industry solution landscapes.
• Knowledge of business ecosystems, both core custom proprietary legacy platforms and solutions and modern SaaS, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), service-oriented architecture (SOA), APIs, open data, microservices, event-driven IT and predictive analytics and experience platforms.
• Demonstrated experience creating and delivering executable architecture strategies across complex ecosystems that balance enabling business capabilities while driving to future state simplified modern architecture.
• Knowledge of business models, operating models, financial models, cost-benefit analysis, budgeting and risk management including security aspects.
• Knowledge of information management practices, system development life cycle management, IT services management, agile and lean methodologies, infrastructure and operations, and EA and ITIL frameworks.
• Understanding of the different types of agile principles, methodologies, and frameworks, especially those designed to be scaled at the enterprise level.
• Understanding of existing, new and emerging technologies, and processing environments.
• Strong leadership skills with exceptional soft and interpersonal skills, including teamwork, facilitation and negotiation.
• Strong consulting skills such as targeted communications, engagement management, stakeholder management and business development.
• Knowledge of all components of enterprise architecture, business and IT principles and processes.
• Familiarity with basic graphical modeling approaches, tools and model repositories.
• Excellent analytical, planning and organizational skills.
• Excellent written, verbal, communication, and presentation skills with the ability to articulate new ideas and concepts to technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Organizationally savvy, with situational and contextual intelligence of the political climate of the enterprise and how to navigate obstacles and politics.
• Balances the long-term ( big picture ) and short-term implications of individual decisions and organization goals.
• Estimates the financial impact of architecture alternatives and applies multiple solutions to business problems.
• Rapidly comprehends the functions and capabilities of new technologies.
• Ready to think, behave and act in an innovative consulting manner to drive the organization’s digital business strategies.
• Understands and speaks the language of the business.

LI-GP1

Salary range : $225k-$275k

Overtime eligible : Exempt

Discretionary bonus eligible : Yes

Sales bonus eligible : No