Enterprise Architect

Job Title: Enterprise Architect – Application Portfolio Rationalization & Modernization

Role Summary

The Enterprise Architect is accountable for shaping and governing the enterprise-wide application landscape, with a strong focus on Application Portfolio Rationalization (APR), modernization, and platform-based IT transformation. This role provides strategic leadership to reduce application sprawl, technical debt, and cost while improving agility, resilience, and alignment to business strategy. The Enterprise Architect works closely with CIO leadership, business executives, domain architects, and delivery teams to define target-state architectures, rationalization roadmaps, and investment priorities.

Key Responsibilities

1) Enterprise Architecture & Portfolio Ownership

• Own the enterprise application architecture across business domains, ensuring alignment to business capabilities and strategy.
• Establish and maintain the enterprise application inventory, including ownership, lifecycle state, cost, risk, and technical health.
• Define enterprise architecture principles, standards, and guardrails to guide solution and platform design.
• Act as a design authority for major transformation initiatives and cross-domain architecture decisions.

2) Application Portfolio Rationalization (APR)

• Lead application portfolio assessments to identify redundancies, overlaps, technical debt, and end-of-life risks.
• Define rationalization strategies and treatment options:
• Retire / Sunset
• Consolidate
• Replace
• Modernize (re-platform, refactor, cloud-native)
• Retain
• Develop fact-based rationalization business cases, quantifying cost savings, risk reduction, and business value.
• Drive alignment between application rationalization and business capability simplification.

3) Target State & Modernization Strategy

• Define target-state application and platform architectures, aligned to cloud-first, product-oriented, and platform-based operating models.
• Establish modernization patterns: strangler, domain decoupling, API enablement, event-driven integration.
• Guide transition from monolithic and legacy systems to microservices, SaaS, and cloud-native platforms.
• Ensure target architectures support scalability, resilience, security, and regulatory compliance.

4) Cloud & Platform Alignment

• Align application portfolio strategy with enterprise cloud and platform strategy (AWS/Azure/GCP, SaaS, PaaS).
• Define standards for build vs buy, SaaS adoption, and platform consolidation.
• Drive reduction of bespoke solutions in favor of shared platforms and reusable services.
• Embed FinOps principles into portfolio decisions to improve cost transparency and optimization.

5) Governance, Investment & Roadmapping

• Establish architecture governance for portfolio decisions, ensuring consistency and transparency.
• Partner with finance, PMO, and product leadership to align investment planning, roadmaps, and funding models.
• Ensure rationalization initiatives are sequenced pragmatically to minimize business disruption.
• Track benefits realization and ensure rationalization outcomes are delivered.

6) Stakeholder Leadership & Influence

• Act as a trusted advisor to CIO, CTO, and senior business leaders on application strategy and technology investment.
• Facilitate executive-level discussions on trade-offs between cost, risk, innovation, and time-to-market.
• Lead and mentor domain, solution, and technology architects.
• Influence cultural shift from project-centric to product and platform-oriented IT.

Required Skills & Experience

Enterprise Architecture & Portfolio Skills

• Extensive experience in Enterprise Architecture with strong focus on application landscapes and portfolio management.
• Proven track record delivering application rationalization and modernization programs at enterprise scale.
• Strong understanding of business capability modeling and mapping applications to capabilities.
• Experience defining target operating models and target application architectures.

Technology & Architecture Expertise

• Deep understanding of legacy modernization, monolith decomposition, and cloud migration strategies.
• Strong knowledge of cloud platforms, SaaS ecosystems, and modern integration patterns (APIs, events).
• Familiarity with microservices, domain-driven design, and platform engineering concepts.
• Solid grounding in security, resilience, data, and compliance considerations at enterprise level.

Financial, Risk & Decision Skills

• Ability to assess technical debt, operational risk, vendor risk, and obsolescence.
• Experience building investment cases and ROI models for rationalization initiatives.
• Strong understanding of cost drivers across application portfolios (run vs change, license, infra, support).

Leadership & Soft Skills

• Executive-level communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Strong facilitation skills for complex, cross-functional decision-making.
• Ability to influence without authority across federated organizations.
• Mentoring mindset with experience building architecture capability.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in regulated industries (banking, insurance, payments, telecom).
• Familiarity with IT4IT, TOGAF, or similar enterprise architecture frameworks.
• Experience working with large application inventories and EA tooling.
• Cloud or architecture certifications (AWS/Azure/GCP, TOGAF).
• Consulting or large-scale transformation program experience.