Distinguished Architect - Enterprise Stability & Resilience Engineering

4 Days in the office from any of our locations in Johnston RI, Dallas TX, Nashville TN, Iselin NJ, Westwood or Medford MA, or Phoenix AZ and couple other locations

Role is not relocation eligible. 

Distinguished Architect, Enterprise Stability & Resilience Engineering

Job Title

Distinguished Architect, Enterprise Stability & Resilience Engineering

Job Summary

The Distinguished Architect for Enterprise Stability & Resilience Engineering is a senior technical leader responsible for defining and driving the enterprise architecture, engineering capabilities, standards, and strategies that enable resilient, reliable, secure, recoverable, and high-performing customer journeys across the organization.

This role is fundamentally different from traditional enterprise, cloud, infrastructure, platform, or application architecture positions. The successful candidate must be capable of understanding business domains, customer behaviors, end-to-end customer journeys, and complex technology ecosystems to identify systemic risks and architect enterprise-wide resilience capabilities.

The Distinguished Architect will partner closely with the Director of Enterprise Stability & Resilience Engineering to establish the future-state strategy, architecture, governance model, engineering controls, and automation capabilities required to improve operational resilience across the enterprise.

The ideal candidate combines deep software engineering expertise, enterprise architecture leadership, business acumen, and systems thinking to create resilience-by-design, reliability-by-design, security-by-design, and recoverability-by-design capabilities that become embedded into the organization's engineering practices.

Key Responsibilities

Enterprise Resilience Architecture

• Define the enterprise architecture vision and strategy for Stability, Resilience, Reliability, Recoverability, Security, and Performance Engineering.
• Develop reference architectures, engineering standards, patterns, frameworks, and reusable capabilities that improve enterprise resilience.
• Architect resilience capabilities across critical customer journeys, business functions, and technology ecosystems.
• Identify systemic risks, architectural vulnerabilities, concentration risks, failure points, and operational dependencies across the enterprise.

Customer Journey & Business Capability Engineering

• Develop deep understanding of business domains, customer journeys, customer behaviors, and critical business capabilities.
• Create end-to-end technology and business capability maps spanning channels, applications, APIs, middleware, data platforms, infrastructure, and third-party services.
• Analyze customer journeys to identify failure scenarios, recovery gaps, resiliency weaknesses, and customer-impact risks.
• Influence technology decisions through a customer-outcome and business-value perspective.

Reliability, Recoverability & Performance Engineering

• Establish enterprise-wide engineering principles for reliability, recoverability, fault tolerance, availability, scalability, and performance.
• Define architectural patterns for disaster recovery, cyber recovery, workload resilience, service continuity, and operational readiness.
• Partner with engineering teams to ensure resilience and reliability requirements are integrated into solution designs.
• Drive engineering approaches that proactively prevent customer-impacting incidents.

Engineering Controls & Automation

• Define and automate resilience and reliability controls within software delivery pipelines.
• Establish architecture guardrails, governance-by-design practices, engineering scorecards, and automated stage-gate controls.
• Reduce dependence on manual governance processes by embedding standards, controls, and policy enforcement directly into engineering workflows.
• Design measurable resilience and reliability maturity frameworks across customer journeys and technology platforms.

Strategic Technology Leadership

• Serve as the enterprise thought leader for resilience engineering and customer journey-centered architecture.
• Influence senior executives, enterprise architects, engineers, and business leaders on resilience strategies and investment priorities.
• Represent Stability & Resilience Engineering in Architecture Review Boards, executive forums, and strategic planning discussions.
• Mentor architects and engineering leaders across the organization.

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in software engineering, solution architecture, enterprise architecture, or large-scale technology leadership roles.
• Demonstrated expertise across software engineering, architecture, delivery, and operational excellence.
• Proven ability to design and influence large-scale enterprise technology ecosystems.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, APIs, integration architecture, event-driven architectures, middleware, data platforms, and enterprise application landscapes.
• Experience designing highly available, fault-tolerant, resilient, and recoverable systems.
• Deep understanding of business capability modeling and customer journey architecture.
• Strong executive communication, influencing, and strategic leadership skills.
• Exceptional systems-thinking capabilities with an ability to connect technology decisions to business outcomes and customer impact.

Preferred Qualifications

• Financial services, banking, payments, or highly regulated industry experience.
• Experience leading customer-journey-centric transformation initiatives.
• Experience in resilience engineering, reliability engineering, performance engineering, operational resilience, disaster recovery, cyber recovery, and risk management.
• Experience defining enterprise engineering standards, governance frameworks, and architecture maturity models.
• Demonstrated ability to influence enterprise-wide engineering and architecture practices.
• Experience creating engineering platforms, automated controls, and governance-by-design capabilities.

Ideal Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate is a rare architect and engineering leader who:

• Thinks in customer journeys rather than individual systems.
• Understands business domains as deeply as technical domains.
• Can identify hidden risks and systemic weaknesses across complex ecosystems.
• Architects resilience, reliability, security, recoverability, and performance as enterprise capabilities.
• Creates standards, patterns, controls, and automation that scale across the organization.
• Bridges executive strategy, enterprise architecture, engineering execution, and operational outcomes.
• Drives resilience-by-design and reliability-by-design across the software development lifecycle.

Pay Transparency 

‌The salary range for this position is $182,000 – $254,000 per year, plus an opportunity to earn additional incentive earnings (if applicable). Actual pay is based on various factors including, but not limited to, the budget, work location, and relevant skills and experience..

We offer competitive pay, comprehensive medical, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, maternity/paternity leave, flexible work arrangements, education reimbursement, wellness programs and more. Note, Citizens’ paid time off policy exceeds the mandatory, paid sick or paid time-away policy of every local and state jurisdiction in the United States. For an overview of our benefits, visit https://jobs.citizensbank.com/benefits

Equal Employment Opportunity

Citizens, its parent, subsidiaries, and related companies (Citizens) provide equal employment and advancement opportunities to all colleagues and applicants for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, citizenship, physical or mental disability, perceived disability or history or record of a disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity or expression, genetic information, genetic characteristic, marital or domestic partner status, victim of domestic violence, family status/parenthood, medical condition, military or veteran status, national origin, pregnancy/childbirth/lactation, colleague’s or a dependent’s reproductive health decision making, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or any other category protected by federal, state and/or local laws. At Citizens, we are committed to fostering an inclusive culture that enables all colleagues to bring their best selves to work every day and everyone is expected to be treated with respect and professionalism. Employment decisions are based solely on merit, qualifications, performance and capability.

Equal Employment and Opportunity Employer

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Background Check

Any offer of employment is conditioned upon the candidate successfully passing a background check, which may include initial credit, motor vehicle record, public record, prior employment verification, and criminal background checks. Results of the background check are individually reviewed based upon legal requirements imposed by our regulators and with consideration of the nature and gravity of the background history and the job offered. Any offer of employment will include further information.