Technology Architect

Job description

Why Stifel Stifel strives for a culture that puts its clients and associates first: a culture where everyone belongs, everyone is welcome, and everyone contributes to the success of our clients, their careers, and the firm as a whole. Let’s talk about how you can find your place here at Stifel, where success meets success .

What You'll Be Doing

The Technology Architect provides technical leadership for technology solutions that support product and business outcomes within Stifel's Technology Product Development organization. This role balances functional requirements, non-functional concerns, engineering practices, and enterprise standards within a regulated financial services environment. The Technology Architect guides and enables product engineering teams to make sound technical decisions within established architectural principles, patterns, and guardrails.

The role focuses not only on solution design, but also on creating clarity, reducing unnecessary complexity, promoting reuse, mentoring engineers, and enabling teams to deliver with increasing technical autonomy.

What We're Looking For

Design end-to-end technology solutions aligned with Stifel’s cloud, data, security, platform, and technology strategies. Guide and enable product engineering teams to make sound technical design decisions within established architectural principles, patterns, and guardrails. Translate business and product needs into clear technical direction, balancing functional and non-functional requirements. Partner with product owners, engineers, platform teams, data teams, security, SREs, and other architects throughout the delivery lifecycle.

Identify, document, promote, and encourage reuse of architectural patterns, practices, technical guidance, and established capabilities before introducing new technology or custom solutions. Mentor engineers and Associate Technology Architects by providing the technical context needed to make sound decisions independently. Ensure solutions align with modern software engineering practices, including DevOps, CI/CD, observability, resilience, and reliability principles.

Incorporate enterprise data, analytics, integration, and AI considerations into technology designs where applicable. Identify architectural risks, dependencies, tradeoffs, and technical debt, and communicate them clearly to stakeholders. Contribute to architecture governance through reusable patterns, documented decisions, and practical guardrails that enable delivery. Participate in backlog refinement and planning where architectural guidance improves story readiness and technical decision-making.

Evaluate and support AI-enabled capabilities and emerging technologies where appropriate. Continuously simplify architecture, improve engineering processes, and reduce unnecessary dependencies on the Architecture function.

What You'll Bring

Strong understanding of APIs, integrations, data persistence, distributed systems, and security fundamentals. Working knowledge of DevOps, CI/CD, observability, resilience, and modern software engineering practices. Demonstrated ability to evaluate technical tradeoffs and make pragmatic architecture decisions. Ability to communicate architecture clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders. Demonstrated ability to collaborate with and influence engineering teams without relying solely on formal authority.

Education & Experience

Minimum Required: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Minimum Required

6+ years of combined experience in software engineering and systems design.

Preferred

2+ years in a role with explicit design or architecture responsibility.

Experience designing cloud-based technology solutions with AWS and experience working in Agile or SAFe environments.

Licenses & Credentials Preferred

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate.

Preferred

SAFe Agilist or an equivalent Agile certification. Systems & Technology #LI-LL1 About Stifel Stifel is more than 130 years old and still thinking like a start-up. We are a global wealth management and investment banking firm serious about innovation and fresh ideas. Built on a simple premise of safeguarding our clients’ money as if it were our own, coined by our namesake, Herman Stifel, our success is intimately tied to our commitment to helping families, companies, and municipalities find their own success.

While our headquarters is in St. Louis, we have offices in New York, San Francisco, Baltimore, London, Frankfurt, Toronto, and more than 400 other locations. Stifel is home to approximately 9,000 individuals who are currently building their careers as financial advisors, research analysts, project managers, marketing specialists, developers, bankers, operations associates, among hundreds more. At Stifel we offer an entrepreneurial environment, comprehensive benefits package to include health, dental and vision care, 401k, wellness initiatives, life insurance, and paid time off.

Stifel is an Equal Opportunity Employer.