Senior Principal - 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:

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: Senior Principal Enterprise Architect 

Career Level: P5 

Job Category: VP

Role Type: Hybrid

Job Location: Bangalore 

About the Team:

Enterprise Architecture establishes standards, target-state roadmaps, governance practices, and modernization strategies across the enterprise. 

Impact:

We are seeking a Principal Enterprise Architect to serve as a thought leader and trusted advisor across the enterprise. Conversant with the full breadth of enterprise architecture (EA) practice — business, data, application, technology, and security architecture — this individual partners with senior technology and business leaders to align architecture decisions with organizational strategy, drive modernization initiatives, and ensure the enterprise technology portfolio is secure, scalable, and cost-effective.

Distinctively, this role brings extensive hands-on experience building agentic AI to automate architecture and design reviews against the enterprise reference architecture. The Principal Architect treats architecture governance as code: codifying standards, patterns, and guardrails so that conformance is continuously and automatically evaluated. They tap directly into CI/CD pipelines to interrogate code and assess alignment with the organization’s architectural north stars — shifting governance left from periodic manual review to continuous, automated assurance.

A central focus is enterprise resilience: the role builds AI-driven capabilities that evaluate designs for availability risk, single points of failure, blast radius, and recovery alignment, embedding resilience scoring and proactive feedback into the design lifecycle and into the Enterprise Architecture Governance (EAG/ARG) process.

Key Deliverables (Duties and Responsibilities)

Enterprise Architecture Leadership

• Act as a recognized thought leader across all EA domains — business, data, application, integration, technology, and security architecture.
• Partner with senior technology and business leaders to align architecture decisions with organizational strategy and investment priorities.
• Own and evolve the enterprise reference architecture, target-state blueprints, and architectural north stars.
• Drive modernization initiatives — cloud, platform, data, and application transformation — balancing risk, value, and cost.
• Ensure the enterprise technology portfolio is secure, scalable, resilient, and cost-effective; champion rationalization where appropriate.
• Establish and chair architecture governance forums; mentor architects and uplift EA practice maturity across the organization. Agentic AI for Architecture Governance & Resilience
• Build AI-driven automated design analysis that ingests architecture artifacts (diagrams, ADRs, runbooks, IaC) and evaluates them against a curated library of approved patterns, reference architectures, and guardrails — including resilience patterns such as bulkheads, retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, and multi-region / high-availability designs.
• Implement resilience scoring and gap analysis that evaluates every design for availability risk, single points of failure, dependency-chain depth, blast radius, RTO/RPO alignment, and graceful degradation — flagging designs below resilience thresholds before formal governance review.
• Deliver real-time governance feedback via an AI assistant integrated into architecture and design tooling (e.g., LucidChart, draw.io, Confluence, ServiceNow, Abacus), providing inline, proactive resilience and conformance recommendations during the design process.
• Automate compliance and risk scoring of design submissions against regulatory requirements and organizational risk-appetite frameworks, flagging high-severity resilience deviations for human escalation.
• Automate Enterprise Architecture Governance (EAG/ARG) preparation — pre-review summaries, risk assessments, and recommended clarifying questions — surfacing resilience risks prominently to improve the efficiency and quality of governance sessions.
• Codify standards, patterns, principles, and guardrails as machine-evaluable rules — practicing architecture governance as code with human-in-the-loop checkpoints so automated review is reliable, explainable, and auditable.
• Continuously improve agent accuracy through feedback loops, pre-registered success metrics, and measurable reduction in manual review effort.
• Pattern Library, Reporting & Integrations
• Maintain AI-assisted curation of an approved resilience pattern library (chaos engineering playbooks, DR runbooks, HA reference architectures) surfaced contextually during design workflows.
• Stand up governance dashboards and analytics providing visibility into resilience posture, common failure-mode design defects, incident correlation, and architect enablement metrics over time.
• Integrate with existing ITSM, CI/CD, incident management, and enterprise architecture tooling — correlating governance data with production incident history to continuously sharpen resilience heuristics. CI/CD Integration & Continuous Conformance
• Tap into CI/CD pipelines to interrogate code and assess alignment with architectural north stars at build and pull-request time.
• Embed automated architecture conformance checks (policy-as-code / governance-as-code) directly into developer workflows.
• Surface architectural drift, anti-patterns, and non-conformance early — shifting governance left from periodic review to continuous assurance.
• Provide developers with actionable, in-pipeline feedback and clear remediation guidance tied to reference patterns.
• Define gates and exception/waiver workflows that balance velocity with architectural integrity. Strategy, Communication & Influence
• Translate complex architecture trade-offs into executive-ready narratives and decisions for senior leadership.
• Build consensus across business, engineering, security, and operations stakeholders.
• Represent enterprise architecture in strategic planning, portfolio governance, and major investment decisions.

Skills and Qualification (Functional and Technical Skills)

Preferred Education and Experience

• 18+ years in technology, with extensive enterprise architecture experience at scale.
• Deep, demonstrable fluency across EA frameworks and practices (e.g., TOGAF, ArchiMate, Zachman) and modern reference-architecture methods.
• Hands-on experience building agentic AI / LLM-based systems — not just consuming AI tools — including agent design, orchestration, evaluation, and guardrails.
• Proven experience implementing governance-as-code / policy-as-code and integrating automated checks into CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong software engineering foundation: ability to read and reason about code, and to build automation that interrogates codebases.
• Deep understanding of resilience engineering — high availability, disaster recovery, RTO/RPO, blast-radius containment, and graceful degradation.
• Breadth across cloud, data, integration, and security architecture, with the ability to set direction in all of them.
• Track record as a thought leader and trusted advisor to senior technology and business executives.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience in financial services or another large, regulated enterprise.
• Familiarity with frontier AI models and enterprise API integration patterns.
• Experience with developer-platform / paved-road / internal-developer-platform initiatives.
• Relevant certifications (e.g., TOGAF, cloud architecture credentials).

Relationships & Collaboration

Reports to: Senior Director

Partners: Tech leadership, ARG, SLT

Leads: Enterprise Architecture

Accessibility Needs

We are committed to providing an inclusive and accessible hiring process. If you require accommodation at any stage (e.g. application, interviews, onboarding) please let us know, and we will work with you to ensure a seamless experience.

Equal Employment Opportunity

FC Global Services India LLP (First Citizens India) is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive and accessible environment and prohibit all forms of discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, caste, disability, sexual orientation, economic status or any other characteristics protected by the law. We strive to foster a safe and respectful environment in which all individuals are treated with respect and dignity. Our EEO policy ensures fairness throughout the employee life cycle.