[Hiring] Principal Enterprise Architect @First Citizens Bank

Role Description

First Citizens Bank seeks an accomplished Principal Enterprise Architect to drive enterprise-wide architecture with deep specialization in non-functional requirements, particularly resiliency, disaster recovery, scalability, and high availability. The increasing sophistication, velocity, and scale of cyber threats require a dedicated leadership role focused on all critical platforms across the bank. This leader will ensure proactive identification, mitigation, and governance of threats and vulnerabilities, while strengthening operational continuity, regulatory compliance, and enterprise-wide risk posture. This role requires a seasoned practitioner with strong engineering roots who can balance strategic vision with pragmatic execution, ensuring critical banking platforms remain robust, performant, and available as we scale across a complex post-merger technology landscape. Remote eligible.

Qualifications

• Minimum Required Education and Experience: Bachelor's Degree and 10 years' experience OR High School Diploma or GED/Equivalent and 14 years' experience in Application Development, Systems Engineering, or Information Technology management.
• 15+ years of technology leadership experience with at least 10 years in enterprise, solution, or platform architecture roles.
• Demonstrated success leading enterprise-wide initiatives through influence rather than direct authority.
• Proven ability to drive alignment and execution across large, complex organizations with competing priorities.
• Experience navigating highly matrixed environments and building consensus among senior business and technology leaders.
• Strong financial services experience with a deep understanding of regulatory resiliency expectations.
• Track record improving enterprise resiliency, scalability, disaster recovery readiness, or operational stability at scale.
• Exceptional ability to influence decision-making across executive, business, and technical stakeholder groups.
• Strong organizational awareness and political acumen with the ability to navigate complex organizational dynamics effectively.
• Demonstrated ability to challenge assumptions and drive better outcomes through collaboration, critical thinking, and relationship leadership.
• Proven track record building coalitions, resolving competing priorities, and driving enterprise alignment.
• Experience leading through ambiguity and guiding organizations through complex technology and operational decisions.
• Ability to translate architectural concepts into clear business outcomes, risks, and investment recommendations.
• Ability to evaluate technology decisions through the lens of business strategy, operational risk, customer impact, and regulatory requirements.
• Experience influencing executive-level prioritization and funding decisions.
• Skilled at aligning technology investments with measurable business outcomes and enterprise objectives.

Requirements

• Serve as the enterprise leader for resiliency and scalability outcomes, driving alignment across technology, operations, risk, and business stakeholders.
• Leverage deep organizational awareness to identify dependencies, remove barriers, and accelerate execution across complex initiatives.
• Influence strategic investment decisions by articulating technology risks, opportunities, trade-offs, and business impacts.
• Constructively challenge teams, leaders, and established approaches through data-driven analysis, problem solving, and collaborative engagement.
• Build consensus across diverse stakeholder groups while maintaining focus on long-term enterprise resiliency and scalability objectives.
• Partner with executives and delivery leaders to ensure architectural priorities translate into measurable business and technology outcomes.
• Establish governance mechanisms that drive accountability for resiliency, recovery, and availability commitments across the enterprise.
• Define enterprise architecture strategies aligned with business objectives, operational resilience requirements, and growth trajectories.
• Establish enterprise standards, patterns, and reference architectures that enable scalable and resilient technology delivery.
• Lead enterprise decision-making processes that balance innovation velocity, operational stability, regulatory expectations, and risk management.
• Drive multi-year technology roadmaps and influence execution priorities across application, infrastructure, and platform teams.
• Lead the enterprise resiliency agenda by partnering with engineering, infrastructure, operations, security, and risk teams.
• Establish enterprise disaster recovery strategies, recovery objectives, testing programs, and remediation plans.
• Drive organizational readiness through resiliency exercises, scenario planning, and operational preparedness initiatives.
• Facilitate post-incident reviews that focus on systemic improvement, accountability, and actionable remediation.
• Influence technology investment decisions that improve enterprise resilience and reduce operational risk.
• Drive adoption of enterprise-wide scalability and availability patterns across critical business platforms.
• Partner with product and engineering leaders to proactively identify growth constraints and operational risks.
• Lead capacity planning and availability strategies that support business growth and evolving customer demand.
• Ensure architecture and engineering decisions support established service-level objectives and business resiliency goals.
• Provide architectural leadership for mission-critical initiatives and major transformation programs.
• Conduct architecture reviews focused on identifying risk, improving execution outcomes, and accelerating delivery.
• Coach technical leaders and engineering teams on resiliency, scalability, and operational excellence practices.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to executives and technology leaders during strategic planning, major incidents, and critical decision points.

Benefits

• This job posting is expected to remain active for 30 days from the initial posting date listed above.
• The base pay for this position is generally between $155,000 and $250,000.
• Actual starting base pay will be determined based on skills, experience, location, and other non-discriminatory factors permitted by law.
• For some roles, total compensation may also include variable incentives, bonuses, benefits, and/or other awards as outlined in the offer of employment.
• Benefits are an integral part of total rewards and First Citizens Bank is committed to providing a competitive, thoughtfully designed and quality benefits program to meet the needs of our associates.