Director, Enterprise Architecture - Digital & Omnichannel

You are as unique as your background, experience and point of view. Here, you’ll be encouraged, empowered and challenged to be your best self. You'll work with dynamic colleagues - experts in their fields - who are eager to share their knowledge with you. Your leaders will inspire and help you reach your potential and soar to new heights. Every day, you'll have new and exciting opportunities to make life brighter for our Clients - who are at the heart of everything we do. Discover how you can make a difference in the lives of individuals, families and communities around the world.

Job Description:

About Enterprise Architecture

The Enterprise Architecture team provides the technology and services our business partners need to continue to innovate for our clients, advisors and partners in order to help our clients achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives. Through innovation and collaboration, we are striving to find new and better ways to bring value to Sun Life globally.

The Opportunity

We are on an exciting path to transform Sun Life Canada’s Client, Sponsor and Advisor journeys, delivering personalized experiences, digitized processes, and consistent capabilities across each business unit.  We are also growing our Sun Life Health and Wealth businesses by offering clients greater services through an expanded digital ecosystem and orchestrated unified commerce.

You will demonstrate a strategic and technology savvy mindset in understanding the Sun Life customer Digital & Omni-Channel journeys. You will work with business partners to deliver Client Journey capabilities onto modern digital and strategic platforms. We are creating a unified and frictionless customer experience across different sales channels and touchpoints. The goal of this orchestrated seamless commerce is to make our customer journey as smooth and integrated as possible, regardless of the channels with which the customer is engaged throughout their journey.

What you’ll be doing:

Reporting to the AVP, Enterprise Architecture - Digital Journeys & Omnichannel, this role will closely partner with the Client Experience Office (CXO), Digital platform teams, Infrastructure teams and other Sun Life business units to create the client journeys enterprise technology solutions and integration architecture for an orchestrated client lifecycle across product lines and channels:

• Responsible to develop and publish architectural blueprints for client journey and experience products for both web and mobile. This includes defining requirements, principles, capability assessments, gap analysis, feasibilities, risk assessments, component specifications, and other models to guide technology decisions.
• Accountable to ensure overall architecture integrity of solutions while bringing right enablers for business capabilities by mitigating risks, and where applicable deliver building blocks through MVPs (minimal viable products).
• Build consensus among technology and business stakeholders to ensure viability and alignments of north star architecture. This also includes accountability to get approvals of architecture through Architecture Governances Forums.
• Support the creation of a multi-year product roadmaps that addresses (1) modernizing client journeys & experiences, (2) enables One Sun opportunities across Sun Life and (3) creates an ecosystem for deep client engagement.
• Collaborate with Product Owners & Hubs to align the roadmaps with other technology and platform strategies. 
• Develop proof of concepts that validate the solutions, and present results to leaderships and executive audiences.
• Coach product teams to deliver within timelines, create modular and scalable solutions that addresses future architectural changes and design. Guide them on technology strategy related to coding practices, continuous integration, automated deployment.
• Provide architecture support for journeys across various lines of businesses including Client Experience Office (CXO), Global Retirement & Investments, Group Benefits, and Retail.

You will also be responsible for the following:

• Shape technical strategy for client journey products (e.g., build vs. buy decisions, modernization approach, technical road-mapping)
• Drive modernization, cloud and API adoption across client journey products.
• Provide direct day to day tactical coaching, direction and guidance to technical leaders within the client journey teams.
• Evaluate and identify appropriate technology stacks, platforms and vendors, including web application frameworks and cloud providers for solution development.
• Support the usage of Agile methodologies and DevOps frameworks for client journey delivery.
• Provide guidance and insight to establish governance processes, direction and control to ensure objectives are achieved and risks are managed appropriately for the evolution of client journeys.

The experience you need to be successful in the role:

• Knowledge of the Insurance and/or Financial Services landscape in Canada, or other similar industries where the external customer experience journey is of high quality (eg. telecommunications).
• 15+ years of experience across application development, application programming interfaces (APIs), Open API specification and Swagger, web & mobile applications, modern Javascript (React or similar), micro-frontends, UI/UX design systems, Cloud / SaaS application integration and middleware to enable the needs of client journeys.
• Specialized Architecture Road Mapping skills. The creation of frameworks, patterns and models in both web and mobile environments.
• Experience with SPA (Single Page Application) architecture would be a strong asset.
• Architecture certifications are definite assets (e.g., TOGAF, ArchiMate, AWS, etc.).
• Hands on experience with any of Enterprise architecture tools (e.g. Sparx EA, Ardoq, Orbus, AWS Well-Architected etc.).
• Technology Industry - vendors, solutions, emerging technology, market trends, and determine potential impact to business services and process.
• Operational knowledge of AWS cloud technology frameworks including VPC’s, Lambda, EC2, S3, Glacier, Redshift, Sagemaker etc is an asset. Experience with alternative major cloud environments will also be considered.
• Successful completion of a Masters or Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, IT Management or related field.

What’s in it for you?

• Great Place to Work® Certified for Most Trusted Executive Team in Canada – 2024
• Great Place to Work® certified for Best Workplaces in Ontario - 2023
• Great Place to Work® Certified in Canada in Financial Services and Insurance – 2023
• Great Place to Work® Certified in Canada for Most Trusted Executive Team - 2023
• Great Place to Work® Certified in Canada and the US - 2022
• Great Place to Work® list for Best Workplaces for #HybridWork – 2022
• Great Place to Work® list for Best Workplaces for Professional Development in Canada – 2022
• Great Place to Work® list for Best Workplaces in Canada – 2022
• Named “Best Places to Work” by Glassdoor – 2021 and 2023
• Canada Award for Excellence for Mental Health at Work - 2021
• Flexible hybrid work model. #LI-Hybrid.
• Pension, stock and savings programs to help build and enhance your future financial security
• Work and professional development that is united by our Purpose: to help Clients and Employees achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives
• A friendly, collaborative and inclusive culture
• Be part of our continuous improvement journey in developing the next greatest digital enterprise experience.
• Competitive salary and bonus structure influenced by market range data
• A common sense dress code, where you decide how you dress based on your day
• The opportunity to move along a variety of career paths with amazing networking potential

The Base Pay range is for the primary location for which the job is posted.  It may vary depending on the work location of the successful candidate or other factors.  In addition to Base Pay, eligible Sun Life employees participate in various incentive plans, payment under which is discretionary and subject to individual and company performance.  Certain sales focused roles have sales incentive plans based on individual or group sales results. 

Diversity and inclusion have always been at the core of our values at Sun Life. A diverse workforce with wide perspectives and creative ideas benefits our clients, the communities where we operate and all of us as colleagues. We welcome applications from qualified individuals from all backgrounds.

Persons with disabilities who need accommodation in the application process or those needing job postings in an alternative format may e-mail a request to thebrightside@sunlife.com.

At Sun Life we strive to create a flexible work environment where our employees are empowered to do their best work. Several flexible work options are available and can be discussed throughout the selection process depending on the role requirements and individual needs.

We thank all applicants for showing an interest in this position. Only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

Salary Range:

110,000/110 000 - 180,000/180 000

Job Category:

IT - Application Development

Posting End Date:

30/04/2024