What LPL does

As the nation's leading independent broker-dealer, they offer an integrated platform of proprietary technology, brokerage, and investment advisor services to more than 16,000 financial professionals and approximately 700 financial institutions. They also support more than 4,000 other financial professionals with customized clearing solutions, advisory platforms, and technology.

Business Model

One of the distinguishing characteristics of their business model is the ability to consistently generate significant free cash flow. LPL does not provide investment banking or other alternative financial services.

They do not engage in market-making activities, nor do they engage in speculative trading for their own account. Their trading activities are focused solely on facilitating trades for the clients of their financial advisors.

In addition, LPL has no direct exposure to mortgage-related investments or securities, nor do they provide loans to hedge funds or other speculators, which lowers credit risk.

What LPL does provide is technology, brokerage, and investment advisory services through business relationships with independent financial advisors, registered investment advisors (RIAs), and financial institutions and their respective financial representatives - LPL refers to collectively as their "clients."

They offer clients access to a broad array of financial products and services to support them in providing financial advice and brokerage services to retail investors. Financial advisors and institutions are their only clients.

Culture

One team on one mission

It's up to each of us to deliver on our mission: taking care of our advisors so they can take care of their clients. We employ only the best to share in this responsibility and together we form an extraordinary team. Like any great team, we use all our players and play to their many strengths to achieve success. As a team, we strive to give advisors the best possible client experience. When we all own our piece of this experience, everybody wins.

Seek, embrace, and apply feedback

Feedback-from our advisors and from one another - is a powerful tool. Our culture embraces continuous improvement. We encourage experiments, learn from mistakes, and use feedback to help us think about how we might do something differently for a better outcome. Feedback enables authentic dialogue and is the foundation for developing great talent.

Stop and consider the big picture

Our client-centric culture requires everyone to look beyond our individual roles and consider the bigger picture. At LPL, we exercise judgment, spot issues before they happen, and solve problems using data and logic. Great service results from anticipating client needs and identifying potential gaps before the client realizes an issue exists. You are empowered to think carefully and critically in the best interest of our advisors. We are all committed to create a respectful, proactive environment.

Value progress over perfection

We are ready for change. By being agile in an ever-changing industry, we can be innovative and use change to grow new opportunities for our team and our advisors. Be a spark for innovation and be comfortable with pursuing progress over perfection. Practice the fundamentals of innovation: experiment, learn, and iterate, demonstrate the courage to share bold ideas; and take calculated risks to help us create extraordinary new capabilities.

Deliver results for our advisors and their clients

LPL advisors make a difference in the lives of millions of people every day and it's our privilege to support them. We earn our advisors' business by being easy to work with and by holding ourselves accountable for delivering exceptional experiences. LPL advisors are at the heart of everything we do.

the opportunity

This is a newly created position to join one of the largest independent broker-dealers and be a part of driving the enterprise architecture strategy across the organization. The SVP & Chief Enterprise Architect (EA) is the key senior leader charged with designing and stewarding LPL Financial's technology and business systems strategies. This individual ensures that the business strategy, along with relevant industry trends and regulatory standards, is expressed in and enabled by enterprise processes and systems. As the senior executive responsible for enteprise architecture, this position defines the principles that guide technology and internal business operations decisions for the enterprise. This role brings unique perspective to LPL Financial's strategy development, identifies the enterprise implications for transformation efforts, and leads the approach to enacting change across both technical and business systems.

The Chief EA leads a team of architects and supporting roles (to include enterprise, cloud, data, integration, infrastructure, and solutions architecture) who own the company's technology strategy and target-state architecture definition. As a key enabler and driver of innovation, this role is expected to bring unique insights, creative solutions, and industry-leading practices to advance the mission of LPL Financial.

Year one expectations

• Build the architecture organization from its current state to a fully formed practice and team capable of defining the overall modernization strategy and supporting the company's on-going roadmap delivery.


• Develop the overall Technology Strategy and elaborate how cloud, data, APIs, and devSecOPs will enable the company's extraordinary company growth projections and digital experiences vision.


• Establish architecture principles, standards, and measurements that drive consistency and efficiency into the technology ecosystem.


• Establish the appropriate governance and control structure that ensures alignment to target-state.


• Develop relationships with business and technology leadership and teams, and establish feedback loops that enable the Architecture organization's continuous improvement.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

The new EA will be a highly technical, forward looking and innovative leader who possesses a solid foundation in software engineering. She/He must be able to work closely with the technology, business, and product leadership team to ensure an architectural framework is in place to support the Company's mission, strategy, and growth. In addition, this executive must have experience working in a highly technical environment utilizing leading edge tools to build an architectural blueprint and framework encompassing legacy systems/platforms as well as emerging compute platforms.

This new leader will define the architectural blueprint and best practices across the organization and be responsible for leading continuous evolution of the technology platform including strategic technology decisions, architectural upgrades and potential integrations. The Chief Architect should operate with close linkage to business stakeholders to ensure priorities are aligned and addressed.

This new leader will lead an organization of 20-30 resources to direct the overall technology strategy for the enterprise and evolve the vision to the next level, defining architectural blueprints, standards and best practices. The organization will be composed of people leaders and senior level architects. S/He should deploy platform architecture as well as drive common architectural standards across the entire organization that emphasize scalability, availability, security, and quality.

The SVP, Enterprise Architect at LPL Financial will:

• Interface with key business and IT leaders for the purpose of setting strategic direction for the Enterprise Architecture.


• Serve as the expert for enterprise architecture tools and technology and provide architectural and strategic consulting in the areas of external trends, best practices and adherence to standards.


• Develop, implement, and govern the guidelines for interactions across systems and business capabilities, defining relationships and outlining the principles for design and evolution.


• Research, develop, and implement innovative solutions across the architecture models to enable strategic objectives.


• Understand, advocate, and support enterprise technology, digital, and data strategies; monitor and analyze the technology environment to detect deficiencies and recommend improvements.


• Lead and facilitate the creation of governing principles to guide information, technology, and solution decision making for the enterprise.


• Lead the effective application of enterprise architecture principles through a deep understanding of the architecture discipline, processes, concepts and best practices.


• Be accountable for the definition and development of principles, guidelines, services, components, tools, standards, assets and frameworks required to support LPL Financial's architecture.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE/QUALIFICATIONS

Required qualifications, skills and experience encompass the following.

• Possess extensive experience and skills in cloud computing and cloud native software architectures and patterns.


• Possess a thorough understanding of modern work practices such as DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Lean Enterprise/Lean Startup and Enterprise Agile.


• Demonstrate competency in innovative, strategic thinking and leadership with strong abilities in relationship management.


• Possess experience in process analysis, design, and documentation to drive increased rigor in Enterprise Architecture management.


• Possess in-depth knowledge of SOA principles and frameworks as well as event streaming and messaging technology and patterns.


• Experience implementing architecture governance and strategic roadmaps at the enterprise level.


• Hands-on experience developing architecture blueprints, systems diagrams, data models, process flows, data flows and other key enterprise architecture deliverables.


• Ability to convey technical solutions clearly to the entire organization.


• Experience driving digital transformation of an IT portfolio, moving enterprise workloads to the cloud, driving DevOps and Agile tools, methodologies and culture in the enterprise IT environment at scale.


• Experience developing and deploying IT change programs with detailed business case development and delivery at the board or global business unit level.


• Deep experience in working with senior leaders across the firm to exploit technology in the pursuit of business outcomes.


• Experience in leading large, complex organizations comprised of senior architects and engineers.


• Extensive background and experience in advanced software development techniques.


• Broad experience in infrastructure architecture, design, implementation and operations.


• Track record of successfully working on complicated initiatives encased in ambiguity and uncertainty.


• Strong communication skills and persuasion and influencing skills.


• Adept at defining IT vision and strategy and identification of initiatives that lead to target state architectures and outcomes.


• Adept at continuous learning especially in emerging areas of technology, modern work practices and digital transformation.

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, engineering or a related field is

required. A master's degree in one of the aforementioned fields is preferred.

Why LPL?

At LPL, we believe that objective financial guidance is a fundamental need for everyone. As the nation's leading independent broker-dealer, we offer an integrated platform of proprietary technology, brokerage, and investment advisor services. We provide you with a work environment that encourages your creativity and growth, a leadership team that is supportive and responsive, and the opportunity to create a career that has no limits, only amazing potential.

We areone team on one mission. We take care of our advisors, so they can take care of their clients.

Because our company is not too big and not too small, you can seize the opportunity to make a real impact. We are committed to supporting workplace equality, and we embrace the different perspectives and backgrounds of our employees.We also care for our communities, and we encourage our employees to do the same. This creates an environment in which you can do your best work.

Want to hear from our employees on what it's like to work at LPL? Watch this!

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Join the LPL team and help us make a difference by turning life's aspirations into financial realities. Please log in or create an account to apply to this position. Principals only. EOE.

Information on Interviews:

LPL will only communicate with a job applicant directly from an @lpl.com email address and will never conduct an interview online or in a chatroom forum. During an interview, LPL will not request any form of payment from the applicant, or information regarding an applicant's bank or credit card. Should you have any questions regarding the application process, please contact LPL's Human Resources Solutions Center at (800) 877-7210.