Head of Enterprise Architecture, SVP at State Street in Quincy, MA

Job description

Who we are looking for The Head of Enterprise Architecture owns the target-state design of the technology estate and the standards, patterns and governance through which it is realised . This is the architectural blueprint that determines how every platform, application and integration in the firm is built, connected, secured and retired. The mandate is to reduce complexity while increasing optionality — cutting technical debt, rationalising a fragmented estate, and establishing the reusable architectural foundations that let engineering teams move faster within known-good boundaries. Success is measured not in documents published but in estate outcomes: fewer bespoke solutions, faster architectural decisions, demonstrably lower run cost, and an architecture capable of absorbing the pace of change that Frontier AI and post-quantum cryptography will impose. A central element of this mandate is establishing the architecture that makes the firm AI-forward — the compute, serving, integration and control foundations on which AI becomes a governed production capability rather than a portfolio of experiments. This is delivered in deliberate partnership with the Head of Data & AI, who owns model strategy, data products and AI delivery. This is a deeply technical leadership role . The successful candidate is a credible principal-level architect who has personally designed systems at scale, and who will lead through technical authority rather than positional mandate — equally effective authoring a reference architecture, defending a standard to a skeptical business-unit CIO, and presenting an estate rationalization case to the Senior Leadership. Why this role is Important to us Architecture is an enabling layer, not a gate. Governance exists to accelerate good decisions, not to inspect bad ones after the fact. If review is the bottleneck, the pattern library has failed. Patterns over permissions. The fastest, cheapest, pre-approved way to build is to use an existing pattern. Teams may deviate through a time-boxed, registered exception — and inherit the support and compliance burden of doing so. Reduce before you add. Every new pattern admitted to the library should retire something. Complexity is the primary long-term cost driver of the estate. Serve the whole estate. Mainframe, vendor-package, analytics and quant populations receive proportionate patterns and standards. An architecture that governs only greenfield services has failed. Cost is an architectural property. Spend, unit economics and run cost are designed in, not discovered in the invoice — including the economics of accelerated compute and inference. Complementary, not overlapping. Where a peer function owns a domain — Data & AI, Cyber, Developer Platforms — EA owns the interfaces, standards and cross-domain coherence, not the delivery. What you will be responsible for Architecture strategy & governance Own the enterprise technology blueprint across infrastructure, cloud, security, data and application domains; maintain a coherent target state aligned to long-term business strategy. Chair the Technology Standards Board and own the EARB / SARB review mechanisms — running governance through decision logs, fitness functions and time-boxed exception processes that operate at delivery speed. Partner with business-unit technology leaders to prevent domain-level decisions creating enterprise-wide integration debt; clearly delineate architecture accountability from engineering execution. Pattern portfolio & technology standards Define, curate and govern the enterprise pattern library across infrastructure, cloud, integration, security and AI/ML domains, with a formal maturity model (Emerging / Validated / Strategic / Deprecated). Drive active extraction of patterns from production systems — converting institutional knowledge into documented, reusable assets rather than commissioning them in the abstract. Publish a quarterly Technology Radar translating market signal into firm guida