Technical Solution Architect, Marketing & Communications

Our vision for the future is based on the idea that transforming financial lives starts by giving our people the freedom to transform their own. We have a flexible work environment, and fluid career paths. We not only encourage but celebrate internal mobility. We also recognize the importance of purpose, well-being, and work-life balance. Within Empower and our communities, we work hard to create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and our associates dedicate thousands of hours to volunteering for causes that matter most to them.

Chart your own path and grow your career while helping more customers achieve financial freedom. Empower Yourself.

Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time, including CPT/OPT.

The Technical Solution Architect, Marketing & Communications will serve as the lead solution architect for marketing and communications capabilities, partnering with business, product, engineering, data, security, and enterprise architecture teams to shape scalable, secure, and measurable technology solutions. This role will define target-state architectures and guide delivery across web, email, SMS, CRM, analytics, personalization, and customer engagement ecosystems.

What you will do:

• Define and maintain the solution architecture vision, standards, and roadmaps for marketing and communications capabilities.
• Partner with marketing, digital, data, product, and engineering leaders to align business priorities with technology strategy and solution investments.
• Translate marketing objectives, including acquisition, onboarding, engagement, retention, personalization, and campaign measurement, into pragmatic architecture decisions that improve customer experience, speed to market, resiliency, and total cost of ownership.
• Design end-to-end architectures spanning websites, mobile and CMS platforms, CRM and campaign platforms, customer data integration, messaging channels, APIs, event-driven services, analytics, and downstream operational systems.
• Lead architecture for cross-channel customer engagement solutions across email, SMS, push notification, web, and direct-mail-enabled ecosystems where applicable.
• Create reference architectures, architecture decision records, and reusable patterns for MarTech integrations, customer data exchange, identity resolution, personalization, and journey orchestration.
• Evaluate and recommend platform capabilities, integration approaches, and buy-versus-build options across the marketing and communications technology landscape.
• Guide the modernization of legacy or point-to-point solutions toward scalable cloud-native, API-first, and event-driven architectures.
• Ensure solutions address cross-cutting concerns including security, privacy, consent, performance, observability, resiliency, accessibility, and operational supportability.
• Collaborate with delivery teams on solution design, decomposition, interface contracts, nonfunctional requirements, and implementation tradeoffs.
• Influence data and event design to support campaign targeting, customer segmentation, experimentation, attribution, and performance measurement.
• Provide architecture leadership for vendor selection, proof of concept efforts, and strategic initiatives involving internal teams and third-party partners.
• Contribute to architecture governance, best practices, and mentoring of engineers, analysts, and other architects.

What you will bring:

• 10+ years of experience designing and delivering enterprise applications, digital platforms, or customer-facing technology solutions, including significant experience in marketing technology or digital communications ecosystems.
• 5+ years of experience in solution architecture across multiple architecture domains, including application, integration, data, infrastructure, and security.
• Hands-on experience designing production-grade system integration architectures that support scalability, security, resiliency, and durability.
• Practical exposure to REST APIs, event-driven architecture, pub/sub, queue-based processing, batch processing, retry/replay patterns, and third-party vendor/API rate-limit handling.
• Demonstrated understanding of marketing and communications concepts such as campaign management, lead flows, customer journeys, segmentation, personalization, event tracking, content delivery, consent management, and marketing measurement.
• Hands-on experience designing distributed systems, including APIs, microservices, event-driven architecture, and asynchronous messaging.
• Experience designing solutions on AWS and working knowledge of services such as Lambda, API Gateway, SQS/SNS, MSK, RDS, DynamoDB, CloudFront, IAM, and CloudWatch.
• Strong knowledge of data modeling, customer data movement, analytics instrumentation, and integration patterns supporting customer 360 and campaign activation use cases.
• Architecture and engineering experience, including REST API design, microservices, event-driven architecture, distributed systems fundamentals, and solution decomposition.
• Experience designing systems against nonfunctional requirements such as scalability, latency, throughput, resiliency, observability, security, privacy, and operational support.
• Cloud and platform engineering experience, including AWS architecture, CI/CD, infrastructure as code fundamentals, containerization, and cost-aware design.
• Data and analytics experience, including relational and NoSQL concepts, event taxonomy, customer data integration, analytical data pipelines, and support for attribution and measurement.
• Knowledge of the MarTech ecosystem, including CRM, campaign platforms, messaging services, customer data platforms, and orchestration patterns across engagement channels.
• Ability to communicate architecture tradeoffs clearly to business and technology stakeholders and influence decisions across teams.
• Executive presence and the ability to communicate architecture direction, options, and tradeoffs in business terms.
• Ability to collaborate across marketing, product, engineering, security, infrastructure, analytics, and vendor teams.
• Comfort leading through influence, building alignment, and challenging the status quo when needed.
• Strong problem-solving skills, strategic thinking, and the ability to connect near-term delivery to longer-term platform direction.
• Coaching and mentoring mindset with a focus on raising architectural maturity and engineering quality.

What will set you apart:

• Experience with one or more marketing platforms such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce CRM, Adobe Experience Cloud, Twilio, customer data platforms, tag management platforms, or comparable tools.
• Experience designing for cross-channel orchestration, including email, SMS, push notifications, web personalization, and campaign measurement.
• Understanding of email deliverability, preference and consent management, customer identity considerations, and data governance in regulated environments.
• Experience with event instrumentation, digital analytics, A/B testing or experimentation, and performance dashboards used by marketing teams.
• Familiarity with direct marketing, lead routing, campaign data models, and integration of marketing platforms with enterprise systems and data platforms.
• Experience with web and digital experience architecture, including CMS or headless CMS concepts, website performance, CDN and caching strategies, and secure customer-facing application design.
• Experience in financial services or another highly regulated industry is strongly preferred.

What we offer you

We offer an array of diverse and inclusive benefits regardless of where you are in your career. We believe that providing our employees with the means to lead healthy balanced lives results in the best possible work performance.

• Medical, dental, vision and life insurance
• Retirement savings – 401(k) plan with generous company matching contributions (up to 6%), financial advisory services, potential company discretionary contribution, and a broad investment lineup
• Tuition reimbursement up to $5,250/year
• Business-casual environment that includes the option to wear jeans
• Generous paid time off upon hire – including a paid time off program plus ten paid company holidays and three floating holidays each calendar year
• Paid volunteer time — 16 hours per calendar year
• Leave of absence programs – including paid parental leave, paid short- and long-term disability, and Family and Medical Leave (FMLA)
• Business Resource Groups (BRGs) –  BRGs facilitate inclusion and collaboration across our business internally and throughout the communities where we live, work and play. BRGs are open to all.

Base Salary Range

The salary range above shows the typical minimum to maximum base salary range for this position in the location listed. Non-sales positions have the opportunity to participate in a bonus program. Sales positions are eligible for sales incentives, and in some instances a bonus plan, whereby total compensation may far exceed base salary depending on individual performance. Actual compensation offered may vary from posted hiring range based upon geographic location, work experience, education, licensure requirements and/or skill level and will be finalized at the time of offer.

Equal opportunity employer •  Drug-free workplace

We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to diversity.  All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age (40 and over), race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, pregnancy, religion, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable state or local law. 

***For remote and hybrid positions you will be required to provide reliable high-speed internet with a wired connection as well as a place in your home to work with limited disruption. You must have reliable connectivity from an internet service provider that is fiber, cable or DSL internet. Other necessary computer equipment, will be provided. You may be required to work in the office if you do not have an adequate home work environment and the required internet connection.***

Job Posting End Date at 12:01 am on:

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