Vice President, Enterprise Infrastructure Architecture at Northwestern Mutual Investment Services, LLC

At Northwestern Mutual, we are strong, innovative and growing. We invest in our people. We care and make a positive difference.

Summary:

The Vice President of Enterprise Infrastructure Architecture will provide strategic leadership for the architecture, design, and implementation of enterprise-wide infrastructure solutions. This role is pivotal in ensuring that the company’s IT infrastructure aligns with business goals, supports growth, and remains resilient, scalable, and secure. The VP will work closely with other senior leaders, including those in IT, business units, and external partners, to drive innovation, optimization, and transformation across the enterprise infrastructure.

Primary Duties & Responsibilities:

• Lead a team of enterprise architects to deliver on business outcomes to advance the business and technical aspirations of the enterprise.
• Strategic Leadership & Planning: Develop and lead the strategic vision for enterprise infrastructure architecture, aligning with business objectives. Participate in creating a roadmap for the evolution of infrastructure platforms, considering trends in cloud computing, data centers, networking, and storage.
• Infrastructure Architecture Design: Lead the design and deployment of robust, scalable, and secure enterprise infrastructure across the organization to support business continuity, disaster recovery, and high availability.
• Technology Innovation & Transformation: Help NM to stay current on emerging infrastructure technologies and support transformation initiatives that enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and drive business value through cloud migration, edge computing, and automation.
• Governance, Risk & Compliance: Ensure that all infrastructure designs and implementations meet regulatory, security, and compliance standards. Collaborate with the information security team to establish secure infrastructure architectures and defend against evolving cyber threats.
• Identify impacts to the business and technical ecosystem of changes in business or technology direction and provide recommendations to address with stakeholders.
• Collaborate with strategic stakeholders to coordinate business and technical roadmap(s) which describe business, architectural, and technology strategies with rolling wave planning.
• Develop and maintain a business knowledge base to enable executable strategies and impact analysis.
• Support partner delivery organizations through the promotion of best practices, standards, patterns, and architectures.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field (Master’s Degree preferred).
• Minimum of 15 years’ experience architecting, designing, and implementing enterprise-scale solutions and business relationship management.
• Learning Oriented: Strives to learn more about the people he or she is working with, about the business, the business environment, technology and its application, and the process being followed.
• Continuous Improvement: Use of a systematic approach for evaluating current processes and identifying options to streamline them.
• Strategic Thinking & Vision: Able to see the bigger picture and have a long-term vision. Recognizes the importance of a vision to drive out opportunities for reuse.
• Multidisciplinary: Works closely with business stakeholders to understand their vision and how to leverage technology more effectively to provide greater value. Works closely with delivery teams to help guide and coach the team in architectural skills and concepts.
• Pragmatic: Knows when to trade off short and long-term gains and can help guide stakeholders through these decisions while coaching them on the implications.
• Business focused: Understand and appreciate the business and the way it operates to effectively interact with, and support, business leaders.
• Customer focus (internally/externally): Capacity to anticipate customers’ needs and place customers at the center of own thinking and actions.
• Technical Debt Savvy: Become a driving force for addressing technical debt by guiding and coaching delivery teams on both avoiding new debt and removing old debt. Works with business leaders to understand the implications of technical debt and helps guide them in supporting the delivery teams to address it.
• Coaching skills: Knows how to provide constructive feedback, guidance, and support.
• Experience with business architecture methodologies.

Compensation Range:

Pay Range - Start: $183,680.00

Pay Range - End: $341,120.00

Northwestern Mutual pays on a geographic-specific salary structure and placement in the salary range for this position will be determined by a number of factors including the skills, education, training, credentials, and experience of the candidate; the scope, complexity as well as the cost of labor in the market; and other conditions of employment. At Northwestern Mutual, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. Please note that the salary range listed in the posting is the standard pay structure. Positions in certain locations (such as California) may provide an increase on the standard pay structure based on the location. Please click here for additional information relating to location-based pay structures.

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