Distinguished Architect - Enterprise Security

Description

Are you ready to take on a pivotal role that will shape the future of security architecture in a leading financial institution? We are seeking three seasoned and visionary Distinguished Enterprise Architects to join our dynamic security organization, each aligned to one of our key business areas: Commercial Banking, Consumer Banking, and Private Banking. In this highly strategic role, you will have the opportunity to drive architecture across these domains, partnering closely with technical and business leaders to make a lasting impact.

While the role resides within the security function, this is far from a narrow security engineering position. You will leverage core enterprise architecture principles to ensure secure, scalable, and resilient design across all technology layers including cloud, infrastructure, applications, and data, grounded in frameworks such as TOGAF, Zachman, and NIST. Your expertise will be instrumental in transforming our security landscape and empowering our business units to achieve their strategic goals with confidence.

Key Responsibilities

• Champion customer protection on the front lines of delivering strategic initiatives for the company.
• Define and evolve enterprise-wide architecture strategies aligning with both business goals and cybersecurity objectives.
• Partner with line-of-business architects, ensuring cohesive integration of business, application, data, and technology architecture domains.
• Lead the development of architecture standards, creating reference models and reusable patterns that promote consistency across cloud platforms, DevOps, and software development efforts.
• Champion secure-by-design principles, applying these principles across the full SDLC without being prescriptive to specific languages, stacks, or front-end design.
• Serve as a senior advisor, translating regulatory requirements and risk posture into actionable architectural guidance across technology and security teams.
• Collaborate with Infrastructure, DevOps, SRE, and Engineering leaders to embed architectural controls into CI/CD pipelines, runtime environments, and operational workflows.
• Evaluate and guide the adoption of emerging technologies focusing on cloud-native platforms, identity frameworks, API security, secure data exchange, and container orchestration with an emphasis on innovation and risk reduction 

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in senior technical roles with demonstrated leadership at the enterprise or divisional level.
• Ability to drive security-focused initiatives, unifying technical security, enterprise architecture, application architecture, and business outcomes.
• Ability to align security priorities with the broader business context, tailoring security policies and measures to meet the organization's evolving needs.
• Strong communication and presentation skills with the ability to distill complex architecture topics for both technical and executive audiences.
• Experience embedding security into key business initiatives such as digital transformation, customer experience enhancement, and operational efficiency.
• Strong grounding in enterprise architecture concepts with practical application across multiple architecture domains.
• Demonstrated success achieving results within tight budgetary constraints.
• A passion for coaching junior team members.​
• Deep experience in cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP), DevOps and infrastructure automation, and modern application architectures (microservices, APIs, containers).
• Hands-on experience with Enterprise application development, including expertise in multiple programming languages and database technologies.
• Solid understanding of cybersecurity architecture, including identity, access, encryption, secure network design, and threat modeling.
• Proactive security design experience, ensuring security concerns are proactively designed (shift-left) to enable the organization to pursue its strategic goals with confidence.
• Experience fostering a security-driven culture, promoting security as a business enabler, driving secure scalability, protecting sensitive data, and maintaining regulatory compliance, all while accelerating business value and supporting long-term growth.
• Ability to work across a matrixed environment, influencing without direct authority.
• This is not a management position, but experience is a plus.​
• Experience working with regulatory agencies is a plus.

Education and Certifications

• Required: Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, related discipline, or equivalent experience.
• Preferred: Master's degree in Software Engineering, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related discipline.

Pay Transparency

The salary range for this position is $170,000 - $250,000 per year plus an opportunity to earn an annual discretionary bonus. Actual pay is based on various factors including but not limited to the 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.

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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.