VP, Architecture

About the Role JD Power is seeking a senior technology leader to serve as Vice President of Architecture, responsible for defining and governing the enterprise technical architecture across the company’s entire engineering organization. This role owns the architectural standards, the NorthStar technical principles, and the architecture review process that ensure consistency, quality, and sound technology decisions as JD Power scales. You will establish a unified, federated model of architectural governance that balances team autonomy with enterprise consistency across acquired entities. What You'll Do

• Architectural Standards & NorthStar Principles: Own Enterprise Architecture: Consolidate the disparate architectural conventions of acquired entities into a single set of enterprise standards, reference architectures, and playbooks.
• Publish NorthStar Principles: Define, publish, and maintain the NorthStar technical principles—covering front-end frameworks, back-end services, authentication, data platform, and CI/CD—and keep them current as technology evolves.
• Drive Enterprise Technology Decisions: Lead enterprise-level technology choices (e.g., AI tooling, UI stack, CIAM, data platform) with clear rationale, and ensure consistent adoption across all engineering teams.
• Champion Consistency & Reuse: Promote shared component libraries, common patterns, and a consistent look, feel, and engineering experience across all JD Power products.
• Architecture Team & Guild Leadership: Lead the Enterprise Architecture Team: Build, mentor, and direct a small, high-caliber team of enterprise architects responsible for cross-cutting and enterprise-scope initiatives.
• Lead the Architect Guild: Lead the guild of architects embedded within engineering teams under the SVP of Engineering—setting their charter, raising their capability, and aligning their work to enterprise standards while preserving team autonomy.
• Operate a Federated Model: Establish a federated (hybrid) governance model that balances local team ownership of system-level decisions with enterprise consistency on cross-cutting concerns.
• Develop Architecture Talent: Develop architecture talent, define career paths and expectations for architects across the organization, and grow the bench of senior technical leaders.
• Architecture Review & Governance: Establish the Review Process: Design and run a two-tier architecture review process: product-specific reviews led by embedded architects, and enterprise-level reviews led by the enterprise architecture team.
• Chair the Architecture Council: Stand up and lead an architecture council—comprising enterprise, embedded, and TechOps architects—to evaluate initiatives of enterprise scope and resolve cross-cutting design decisions.
• Integrate with Planning: Integrate architecture review into the quarterly planning cadence, with clear triggers, standardized review artifacts, and a documented path for escalation from team-level to enterprise-level review.
• Govern with Transparency: Centralize architecture review artifacts and decisions (e.g., ADRs) so that rationale is transparent, discoverable, and reusable across the organization.
• Partnership & Influence: Partner Across Technology: Partner closely with the SVP of Engineering, the VP of Infrastructure, TechOps, and Security to ensure architecture decisions are practical, secure, and operable.
• Advise Executive Leadership: Provide executive leadership with clear visibility into key architectural decisions, technical risk, and standards adoption across the engineering organization.
• Lead Through Influence: Influence engineering teams toward sound architecture through clarity, credibility, and collaboration rather than mandate alone. What We're Looking For
• 15+ years of progressive experience in software engineering and technical architecture.
• 5+ years in a VP or Senior Director architecture leadership role.
• Deep technical expertise across modern application, data, cloud, and platform architecture, and demonstrated ability to lead both a small team of enterprise architects and a broader guild of embedded architects.
• Proven track record of influencing executive and engineering decision-making and driving standards adoption in complex, multi-entity environments.
• Ability to set forward-looking technical strategy and make pragmatic, well-reasoned decisions on real initiatives.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills to partner with SVP of Engineering, Security, and TechOps and to provide visibility to executive leadership.