Chief Architect of Advisor Experience Technology

LPL Financial is the #1 independent broker-dealer in the US and a Fortune 500 company, with assets under custody and advisory assets greater than 1.4 trillion USD. It’s a fast-growing fintech firm (NASDAQ: LPLA) with more than 28,000 advisors and more than 1000 institutional wealth managers leveraging LPL’s technology platform and business services.

At LPL, technology resources are about 35% of the company’s total resource pool, clearly demonstrating that technology is not only supporting our business but also truly powering growth and investments. It is an exciting time to be part of LPL technology as we are leveraging the latest and greatest technology and innovation to empower the future growth of the firm.

Why Advisor Experience Technology?

Financial Advisors are demanding personalized experiences that allow them to better serve the specific needs of their customers. Advisors expect seamless and user-friendly access to tools and information that they rely on to run their businesses and serve their investor clients. The Advisor Experience technology team is critical to delivering this vision, and we will do this by empowering our workforce to align with our strategy and making substantial investments in technology modernization. You will be part of a highly motivated engineering team that’s leveraging cutting-edge technology to deliver world-class products and services to our advisor clients.

Job Overview:

This is a newly created position to join one of the largest independent broker-dealers as a Distinguished Chief Architect of Advisor Experience Technology. This Distinguished Architect will work closely directly with the CIO of Advisor Experience and their leadership team and drive the definition of the target-state architecture across several technology domains that develop and maintain our advisor-facing platforms and experiences. This role will also be a key contributor to driving the broader enterprise architecture strategy across the organization. If the pursuit of excellence is your calling then this role will provide a springboard in your career for (a) learning breadth and depth of the wealth management domain (b) leveraging the public cloud, API-first, domain-driven design, and data mesh architecture and design principles towards delivering best-in-class technology products, and (c) unique experiences interacting directly with financial advisors as well as the satisfaction of your work product being in the hands of customers.

Chief Architect is a key senior leader and individual contributor charged with designing and stewarding mission-critical parts of LPL Financial’s technology and product strategies and solutions. For each domain in Advisor Experience, there are one or more solution and data architects (domain architects) responsible for detailed design. This role will provide technical architecture leadership and support to this community of solution and data architects. This individual ensures that the business strategy, along with relevant industry trends and regulatory standards, is expressed in and enabled through solution and product architecture. As a senior leader responsible for crafting end-to-end solutions strategy & architecture, this position partners with business, product, and technology leaders and stakeholders to define target-state architecture, inclusive of upstream and downstream dependencies, along with the increments required to achieve that target-state. This role brings a unique perspective to LPL Financial’s strategy development, identifies the enterprise implications for transformation efforts, and leads the approach to enacting change across both technical and business systems.

This executive Architect is a dynamic and strategic individual contributor leadership role that proactively engages executive leadership in the company to influence funding, priorities, and architecture change while also engaging deeply in the technology organization to communicate strategies and collaborate hands-on with solutions. As a key enabler and driver of innovation, this role is expected to bring unique insights, creative solutions, and industry-leading practices to advance the mission of LPL Financial.

Year one expectations

• Immerse yourself in the company’s business vision and strategy and dive into a mission-critical product area to develop a deep understanding of the business and technology domain, including internal and external actors as well as the collection of end-to-end dependencies.

• Partner broadly with fellow architects as well as business and technology stakeholders across the technology organization to align strategy.

• Construct clear documentation that articulates long-term business & technology-aligned target-state and roadmaps for Advisor Experience Technology.

• Contribute broadly to LPL’s solution architecture work and platform foundations, including API definition, framework, and reusable asset identification, and find synergies in business requirements that enable efficiency, enterprise reuse, and enhanced business outcomes.

• Develop close relationships with architecture, business, and technology leadership and teams and establish feedback loops that enable both personal and organizational continuous improvement.

Responsibilities:

This Chief Architect will be a highly technical, forward, and innovative leader who possesses a solid foundation in software engineering. She/He must be able to work closely with other technology, business, and product leaders to ensure an architectural framework is in place to support the LPL Advisor Experience Technology’s mission, strategy, and growth. In addition, this leader must have experience working in a highly technical environment utilizing leading-edge tools to build architectural blueprints and frameworks encompassing legacy systems/platforms as well as emerging compute platforms.

This leader will define the architectural blueprints and best practices for mission-critical product portfolios and be responsible for leading the continuous evolution of the supporting technology platform, including strategic technology decisions, architectural upgrades, and potential integrations. Reusable assets and frameworks generated by the Distinguished Architect will be consumed throughout the enterprise and lead to key business outcomes, such as higher velocity, greater quality, increased architecture consistency, and more. This Architect should operate with a close linkage to fellow architects as well as product and business stakeholders to ensure priorities are aligned and addressed.

This Chief Architect will be a key leader in the broader Enterprise Architecture organization that directs the overall technology strategy for the enterprise. The Architect will contribute to evolving the vision, defining strategies to achieve the vision, and standards and best practices. She/He will drive common architectural standards across the entire organization that emphasize scalability, availability, security, performance, and quality.

The Distinguished Chief Architect, Advisor Experience Technology at LPL Financial will:

• Take a seat on the leadership team of the EVP/CIO who owns Advisor Experience Technology for LPL.

• Interface with key business and IT leaders for the purpose of understanding priorities and delivering modern product architecture strategies and solutions that enable the company’s vision and extraordinary growth.

• Guide a team of domain-aligned solution and data architects to maintain a coherent architectural vision for Advisor Experience Technology.

• Serve as an expert for enterprise architecture tools, technology, and standards while providing architectural and strategic consulting in the areas of external trends, best practices, and adherence to standards.

• Lead the effective application of enterprise architecture principles through a deep understanding of the architecture discipline, processes, concepts, and best practices.

• Be accountable for the definition and development of principles, guidelines, services, components, tools, standards, assets, and frameworks required to support LPL Financial’s architecture.

• Understand and leverage emerging technologies such as AI/ML to drive the transformation of key use cases and experiences.

What are we looking for?

We want strong collaborators who can deliver a world-class client experience. We are looking for people who thrive in a fast-paced environment, are client-focused, team-oriented, and are able to execute in a way that encourages creativity and continuous improvement.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, engineering, or a related field

• Minimum of 15 years experience developing enterprise-class technology and solutions architectures, inclusive of service-oriented or microservices architectures, event-driven architecture, data platforms, and user experience architectures.

• Minimum of 10 years experience designing and implementing strategic roadmaps along with the governance mechanisms to achieve them.M

• Minimum of 5 years of experience in designing and implementing a modern data architecture (e.g., data mesh) is expected.

Technical Competencies

• Strong experience developing architecture blueprints, systems diagrams, data models, process flows, data flows, and other key architecture deliverables following Domain Driven Design (DDD) principles and practices.

• Demonstrated experience with a major enterprise transformation from monolithic to microservices.

• Experience with transformation to cloud architecture is mandatory and specific experience with AWS is a plus.

• Knowledge of API management solutions (e.g., Apigee, Kong HQ, WSO2, AWS Gateway) and experience transforming to an API-first strategy is desirable.

• Ability to articulate technical solutions clearly to the entire organization and experience collaborating directly with senior leadership to leverage technology in the pursuit of business outcomes.

• Adept at defining IT vision and strategy, including cloud adoption roadmaps, and identification of initiatives that lead to target state architectures and outcomes.

• Extensive experience working in large technology ecosystems with emphasis on integrating multiple externally facing high-scale, high volume, always-on mission-critical systems.

Core Competencies:

• Strong executive presence and ability to communicate & engage effectively with senior technology leadership.

• Continuous learner especially in emerging areas of technology, modern work practices, and digital transformation.

• Possesses a thorough understanding of modern work practices such as DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Lean Enterprise/Lean Startup, and Enterprise Agile.

• Demonstrated competency in innovative, strategic thinking, and leadership with strong abilities in relationship management.

• Experience working and leading in matrixed, fast-moving environments.

Preferences:

• A master’s degree in one of the aforementioned fields.

• Financial industry experience, particularly in wealth management, securities, and trading.

• AWS cloud architecture experience.

• AWS Solution Architect certification is a plus.

• Snowflake experience.

Pay Range:

$174,700.00 - $291,100.00

Actual base salary varies based on factors, including but not limited to, relevant skill, prior experience, education, base salary of internal peers, demonstrated performance, and geographic location. Additionally, LPL Total Rewards package is highly competitive, designed to support your success at work, at home, and at play – such as 401K matching, health benefits, employee stock options, paid time off, volunteer time off, and more. Your recruiter will be happy to discuss all that LPL has to offer!

At LPL, we believe that objective financial guidance is a fundamental need for everyone. As the nation’s leading independent broker-dealer, we offer an integrated platform of proprietary technology, brokerage, and investment advisor services. We provide you with a work environment that encourages your creativity and growth, a leadership team that is supportive and responsive, and the opportunity to create a career that has no limits, only amazing potential.

We are one team on one mission. We take care of our advisors, so they can take care of their clients.

Because our company is not too big and not too small, you can seize the opportunity to make a real impact. We are committed to supporting workplace equality, and we embrace the different perspectives and backgrounds of our employees. We also care for our communities, and we encourage our employees to do the same. This creates an environment in which you can do your best work.

We take social responsibility seriously.

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Join the LPL team and help us make a difference by turning life’s aspirations into financial realities. Please log in or create an account to apply to this position. Principals only. EOE.

Information on Interviews:

LPL will only communicate with a job applicant directly from an @lplfinancial.com email address and will never conduct an interview online or in a chatroom forum. During an interview, LPL will not request any form of payment from the applicant, or information regarding an applicant’s bank or credit card. Should you have any questions regarding the application process, please contact LPL’s Human Resources Solutions Center at (855) 575-6947.