Chief Architect, Infrastructure & Enterprise Architecture at Happen in San Francisco, CA

Job description

Current Employees of Happen Bank: Please apply via your internal Workday Account Happen Bank (formerly LendingClub) is built around a simple purpose: to clear the way to help people turn intention into action, and action into financial progress. That means offering focused products, a frictionless mobile-first experience, and clear terms with no gotchas. Respect and fairness is part of our DNA, and that ideal shapes how we work, how we treat each other, and how we invest in our employees and our community. Join us in using data, bold thinking, and a commitment to innovation to help clear the way for millions of Americans to achieve more. About the Role Happen Bank is seeking a Chief Architect to define and lead the Bank's enterprise architecture strategy, technical standards, and infrastructure architecture. This is a hands-on leadership role, with approximately one-third of the position focused on designing cloud and platform infrastructure, reviewing critical technical decisions, and developing reference architectures that enable Engineering teams to deliver secure, scalable, and reliable solutions. You'll lead a federated Architecture Guild across business units and directly manage the Shared Architecture team, establishing clear standards, design governance, and alignment across the organization. Working closely with Engineering, Security, Risk, and Regulatory Relations, you'll ensure architecture decisions balance delivery speed, technical quality, and regulatory requirements. What You'll Do Enterprise Architecture & Governance Define and maintain Happen Bank's enterprise target-state architecture, aligning the long-term technical vision with business objectives and the Architecture Guild Lead the architecture review process, providing direction and resolving complex cross-domain design decisions while ensuring decisions are documented with clear context, alternatives, and tradeoffs Establish and maintain the enterprise technology standards catalog, including approved and retiring patterns, exception processes, and decision-making authority Partner with Security, Risk, and Regulatory Relations to ensure architecture decisions incorporate appropriate security, control, and regulatory considerations Infrastructure & Platform Architecture Serve as the Bank's principal infrastructure architect, providing hands-on technical leadership across cloud topology, network segmentation, compute and runtime platforms, resilience, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and cost architecture Develop reference architectures, detailed design documents, and working implementations that Engineering teams can adopt, partnering with infrastructure teams to deliver reusable tooling and solutions aligned with security and compliance standards Lead architecture for major platform initiatives, including the data platform migration to Databricks, ensuring technical decisions support long-term scalability, reliability, and business needs Architecture Guild Leadership Lead the federated Architecture Guild, establishing recurring design forums, shared standards, cross-team peer reviews, and consistent architecture practices across business units Provide functional leadership and mentorship to architects embedded within business-unit Engineering organizations, partnering with Engineering leaders to ensure architectural coverage and alignment between current and future-state designs Drive architectural consistency while preserving business-unit autonomy and delivery velocity, using clear standards and guardrails rather than unnecessary approval bottlenecks Identify and address architectural debt, duplicated capabilities, and cross-domain design challenges to improve the efficiency and sustainability of the technology environment People & Organizational Leadership Manage, coach, and develop the Shared Architecture team, including Data Architecture, Data Modeling, and Integration Architecture capabilities Establish clear priorities, delivery expectations,