Director- Enterprise Architect

FC Global Services India LLP (First Citizens India), a part of First Citizens BancShares, Inc., a top 20 U.S. financial institution, is a global capability center (GCC) based in Bengaluru. Our India-based teams benefit from the company’s over 125-year legacy of strength and stability. First Citizens India is responsible for delivering value and managing risks for our lines of business. We are particularly proud of our strong, relationship-driven culture and our long-term approach, which are deeply ingrained in our talented workforce. This is evident across all key areas of our operations, including Technology, Enterprise Operations, Finance, Cybersecurity, Risk Management, and Credit Administration. We are seeking talented individuals to join us in our mission of providing solutions fit for our clients’ greatest ambitions.
Job Description:
Value Proposition:
Executive-level influence, distinguished technical authority, hands-on delivery engagement. The role is expected to move fluidly from enterprise strategy and executive discussion to architecture models, policy controls, engineering artifacts, AI evaluations, and deep technical problem solving
Focus on Enterprise-Wide Influence: Shape enterprise technology direction and influence strategic investments across the organization.
Focus on AI-Powered Innovation & Transformation: Build agentic AI-driven governance capabilities embedded into engineering workflows.
Job Details
Position Title: Director Enterprise Architect
Career Level: P6
Job Category: Director
Job Location: Bangalore
Role Type: Hybrid
About the Team:
Enterprise Architecture establishes standards, target-state roadmaps, governance practices, and modernization strategies across the enterprise.
Impact:
The Senior Principal Enterprise Architect is one of the organization’s foremost technology authorities, combining enterprise-level influence with deep, hands-on technical leadership. The role shapes enterprise technology strategy, architecture direction, governance, cybersecurity posture, resilience, and adoption of emerging technologies while remaining close enough to delivery to inspect designs, challenge implementation choices, codify controls, and work directly with engineers and architects on complex problems.
A defining mandate is to evolve architecture governance from periodic, document-centric review toward continuous, risk-based assurance embedded in engineering workflows. The Senior Principal Architect translates enterprise principles, standards, security requirements, resilience expectations, and reference patterns into machine-evaluable controls where appropriate, including policy-as-code, governance-as-code, architecture decision records, pipeline gates, automated evidence collection, and AI-assisted review.
The role also pioneers pragmatic use of Frontier AI, Agentic AI, and autonomous decision-support capabilities for architecture, cybersecurity, software engineering, code interrogation, and technology governance. It is accountable for ensuring that emerging technologies move from experimentation to governed enterprise capability with clear guardrails, traceability, human oversight, measurable value, and controlled risk.
This is not a purely advisory position. The successful candidate operates effectively from the boardroom to the engineering workbench: advising executives on strategic trade-offs, mentoring senior architects, reviewing complex designs and code/IaC evidence, shaping reference implementations, partnering with cybersecurity and platform teams, and intervening directly when material architectural risk or delivery complexity requires expert leadership.
Key Deliverables:
Enterprise Technology Strategy & Architecture Leadership
Define and evolve the enterprise architecture vision, principles, target-state architectures, reference architectures, technology north stars, and multi-year modernization roadmaps.
Serve as a recognized authority across business, application, data, integration, cloud, infrastructure, platform, cybersecurity, resilience, and AI architecture.
Advise CIO, CISO, CTO, CDO, CRO, business executives, and investment forums on technology strategy, modernization sequencing, platform choices, sourcing, risk, and architectural trade-offs.
Shape enterprise-wide decisions by translating complex technology options into business outcomes, cost, risk, resilience, delivery implications, and actionable decision paths.
Identify structural technology risks and opportunities across portfolios, including legacy concentration, platform fragmentation, vendor dependency, security exposure, technology debt, and architectural drift.
Architecture Governance, Continuous Conformance & Engineering Enablement
Design and operate a risk-based architecture governance model that applies the right level of review and control based on business criticality, technology risk, change materiality, and regulatory impact.
Establish clear decision rights and an architecture hierarchy spanning principles, standards, reference patterns, strategic and domain decisions, Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), exceptions, and technical-debt acceptance.
Move repeatable architecture and control checks into delivery workflows through policy-as-code, governance-as-code, automated evidence collection, CI/CD integration, and continuous conformance.
Codify approved security, resilience, cloud, data, integration, software-engineering, and platform requirements into machine-evaluable controls where deterministic enforcement is appropriate.
Create golden paths and paved-road patterns that make the compliant architecture the easiest path for engineering teams to adopt.
Detect and address architectural drift, design anti-patterns, unsupported technology, control gaps, non-conformance, and accumulating technical debt before they become production risk.
Define exception and waiver mechanisms with explicit ownership, compensating controls, expiration, remediation commitments, and risk acceptance.
Measure architecture governance by business and engineering outcomes, not review volume alone, including decision velocity, conformance, defect prevention, risk reduction, reuse, modernization progress, and developer experience.
Cybersecurity Architecture & Secure-by-Design Leadership
Partner with cybersecurity leadership to embed secure-by-design principles across enterprise architecture, platform engineering, cloud, software delivery, data, identity, APIs, third-party integration, and AI-enabled systems.
Establish architecture patterns and guardrails for Zero Trust, identity and access management, secrets, encryption, segmentation, API security, software supply-chain security, data protection, and privileged access.
Integrate threat modeling, abuse-case analysis, security architecture review, SAST/SCA/DAST findings, IaC scanning, SBOM intelligence, and runtime signals into architecture decisions and engineering workflows.
Drive architectural approaches that reduce attack surface and systemic risk through isolation, least privilege, dependency control, blast-radius reduction, secure defaults, and defense in depth.
Work directly with security and engineering teams on high-risk designs, material vulnerabilities, complex remediation strategies, and control exceptions when expert technical intervention is required.
Enterprise Resilience & Operational Risk Architecture
Define enterprise resilience architecture and minimum design expectations for availability, recoverability, fault tolerance, business continuity, graceful degradation, capacity, and operational sustainability.
Establish patterns for redundancy, fault isolation, circuit breaking, bulkheads, idempotency, timeout and retry control, dependency decoupling, multi-region operation, data recovery, and controlled failover.
Develop mechanisms to identify single points of failure, dependency concentration, recovery gaps, correlated failure modes, and excessive blast radius across critical business services.
Integrate resilience requirements and validation into architecture reviews, engineering pipelines, test strategies, observability, incident management, and production-readiness processes.
Use operational telemetry, incident patterns, SLO breaches, post-incident findings, and recovery-test outcomes to continuously improve architecture standards and risk models.
Frontier AI, Agentic AI & Autonomous Architecture Review
Lead enterprise architecture for Frontier AI, generative AI, Agentic AI, autonomous workflows, multi-agent systems, and AI-assisted software engineering, balancing innovation velocity with safety, control, and measurable value.
Design AI-assisted architecture review capabilities that evaluate solution designs, architecture artifacts, source code, infrastructure-as-code, pipeline evidence, runbooks, ADRs, and operational context against enterprise standards.
Develop intelligent governance agents that can reason across architecture, security, resilience, data, platform, and engineering domains; identify risk and non-conformance; explain findings; and recommend remediation.
Define the control plane for enterprise AI agents, including identity, authorization, tool access, memory, enterprise context, data boundaries, observability, model routing, evaluation, human approval, rollback, and auditability.
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