Vice President - Senior Lead Architect

If you are excited about shaping the future of technology and driving significant business impact in financial services, we are looking for people just like you. Join our team and help us develop game-changing, high-quality solutions.

As a Senior Architecture Operations & Governance Lead at JPMorganChase within the Commercial & Investment Bank Payments and Merchant Services, you are an integral part of a team that works to develop high-quality architecture solutions for various software applications and platform products. You drive significant business impact and help shape the target state architecture through your capabilities in multiple architecture domains. In this role, you serve as the operational backbone of architecture governance for Merchant Services Acquiring - owning intake, review boards, decision records, standards and guardrails, and exception management to ensure that decisions are timely, documented, and traceable. You will reduce operational overhead on architects, improve consistency and transparency, and enable the broader product and engineering organization to move with confidence.

Job responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end architecture governance process for Merchant Services Acquiring - including request intake, triage, required artifact definition, routing to the right architects and forums, and tracking all items through to closure
• Plan and run architecture review boards and forums, managing agendas, pre-reads, facilitation, minutes and decisions, actions, and follow-ups to ensure reviews are predictable, prepared, and produce high-quality outcomes
• Maintain a clean, auditable decision record - including Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), key architectural decisions, standards alignment, and outcomes - so that decisions are easy to discover, reused across teams, and traceable to clear owners and rationale
• Maintain and continuously improve architecture standards and guardrails, including templates, reference architectures, patterns, and non-functional requirement (NFR) checklists, to drive consistency and quality across teams
• Run exception and waiver workflows - ensuring rationale, approvals, expiry and renewal, and remediation plans are tracked and visible - and identify recurring gaps to drive systemic improvements across NFRs, integration patterns, and security considerations
• Review architecture submissions for completeness and quality - including NFRs, dependencies, resiliency, and security and data considerations - and coordinate remediation with solution teams
• Partner with domain architects to improve architecture content quality and promote reuse of patterns and decisions across product and engineering teams
• Provide clear, lightweight status and metrics on governance throughput - including volume, cycle time, aging, and exception themes - ensuring leadership and stakeholders can easily find what was decided, why, and by whom
• Influence across product and engineering without formal authority to drive timely decisions, reduce coordination overhead on architects, and improve overall governance consistency and transparency
• Leverage enterprise-authorized AI capabilities within the work environment to accelerate architecture analysis and governance workflows, with human-in-the-loop validation and appropriate handling of sensitive data

Required qualifications, capabilities, and skills

• Formal training or certification on architecture concepts and 5+ years applied experience
• Demonstrated experience in architecture governance and operations in a complex technology organization - including running review forums, decision tracking, standards and guardrails management, and exception handling
• Strong understanding of architecture artifacts and workflows - including target state architecture, NFRs, integration patterns, and Architecture Decision Records - you don't have to be the domain architect, but you must be architecture-fluent
• Proven ability to drive closure and influence across multiple stakeholders, including senior engineers, architects, product managers, and program managers, without formal authority
• Excellent stakeholder management, facilitation, and executive-ready written and verbal communication skills
• Strong organizational rigor with demonstrated ability to manage backlogs, actions, owners, deadlines, and traceability across concurrent workstreams
• Demonstrated experience applying enterprise-authorized AI capabilities within architecture and engineering workflows, with strong validation habits and awareness of data sensitivity
• Ability to tackle operational and governance problems independently with little to no oversight
• Tooling familiarity - including Jira, Confluence, AI tools, or similar - and ability to build lightweight dashboards and governance metrics

Preferred qualifications, capabilities, and skills

• Prior hands-on architecture experience in solution or enterprise architecture, technical leadership, or platform and integration architecture
• Background in payments, merchant services, acquiring, or regulated financial services environments
• Familiarity with risk, compliance, and control frameworks and experience managing exception and waiver processes within those contexts
• Experience building or maturing architecture governance programs within large-scale, complex technology organizations
• Demonstrated ability to reduce operational overhead on technical teams while improving governance consistency, transparency, and decision quality