You have a clear vision of where your career can go. And we have the leadership to help you get there. At CNA, we strive to create a culture in which people know they matter and are part of something important, ensuring the abilities of all employees are used to their fullest potential.
CNA seeks to offer a comprehensive and competitive benefits package to our employees that helps them - and their family members - achieve their physical, financial, emotional and social wellbeing goals.
For a detailed look at CNA's benefits, check out our Candidate Guide .
The Architecture Consulting Director will join CNA as a proactive, hands-on individual contributor who will lead our technical vision and strategies for various technology disciplines, while crafting standards, best practices, and building reusable components. This role will guide how CNA builds, ships and runs software faster, with higher quality, while more secure. It is also pivotal in steering Agile architecture practices at CNA in partnership with delivery teams and prioritizing technical enablers to synergize delivery across portfolios.
JOB DESCRIPTION:
Essential Duties & Responsibilities
Visionary Technology Leadership:
- Drive technology vision and strategies and be the subject matter expert in the aligned technical disciplines.
- Collaborate with and influence peer architects and shared service partners across technical disciplines tocontinuously maintain and improve therobustness,currency and simplification ofthe overall CNAtech stacks.
- Enable innovation by monitoring technology trends, identifying and adopting new technologies and practices that deliver business value.
- Embody servant leadership by prioritizing support for the development teams, facilitating collaboration, and empowering team members to enhance performance and achieve their full potential.
Strategic Planning & Delivery Alignment:
- Construct and manage technology roadmaps that integrate with agile workstreams.
- Prioritize technical enablers and facilitate the identification of interdependencies across delivery portfolios.
- Connect dots across delivery portfolios, ensuring technical strategies support and enable business objectives.
Agile Best Practices:
- Advocate and apply Agile architecture practices to ensure that technical capability planning extends the architectural runway for the delivery teams.
- Collaborate with stream-aligned teams to solve real-world problems and discover new technical standards and best practices and harvest reusable assets from the emerging solutions.
- Facilitate the reuse of existing standards, best practices and reusable components by the stream-aligned teams.
Standards, Best Practices & Reusable Components:
- Develop technical standards and best practices, advocating for engineering excellence.
- Establish guardrails on applying standards to real-world use cases while enabling decentralized decision-making by the delivery teams.
- Champion the design and lead the hands-on implementation of reusable components for efficiency and standardization across the enterprise.
Continuous Learning:
- Lead technical discipline guilds to facilitate community engagement, pursue engineering excellence, and advocate open, transparent sharing and contribution via innersourcing.
- Promote a culture of continuous learning and improvements by sharing knowledge and expertise in variousforums.
Reporting Relationship
Typically AVP or above
Skills, Knowledge & Abilities
- Strategic and innovative leader within a technology organization, passionate about advancing technical vision and strategy.
- Hands-on experience with cloud native architecture and modern engineering practices is required, including modern public cloud services (AWS or GCP or Azure), mainstream programming languages (Java, JavaScript/Typescript, Python, etc.) and modern CI/CD platforms.
- Understanding of agile methodologies and application of enterprise architecture principles to the development lifecycle.
- Ability to design target state solution architectures leveraging modern decoupled, event based, API enabled architecture frameworks.
- Strong knowledge of contemporary technology and business trends that allows architecture to solve problems in a creative and cost-effective manner.
- Solid understanding of insurance functions and processes, both within the organization and across the industry
- Excellent communication and interpersonal and consultative skills to work effectively and build partnerships and relationships across the organization.
- Complex problem-solving skills with the ability to effectively and succinctly articulate an approach and solution for solving to both business and technology partners.
- Understanding of end-to-end architecture processes and procedures, with familiarities with EA frameworks (e.g. TOGAF) and SAFe Agile preferred
Education & Experience
- Degree in Business Information Systems, Computer Science or equivalent experience.
- Typically, a minimum of nine years of solid, diverse work experience in technology including experience with business analysis and solution implementation.
- Experience leading complex project teams and engaging with senior level business partners
- Experience in commercial insurance industry and applicable certifications preferred
CNA is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities in the recruitment process. To request an accommodation, please contact [email protected] .
