Director, Solutions Architecture - Enterprise Architecture (Chicago)

Director, Solutions Architecture – Enterprise Architecture

Fitch Group is seeking a Director, Solutions Architecture based in our Toronto office, reporting to the Lead Enterprise Architect for the Fitch Group line of business you support.

This is a hands-on architecture role built around one core relationship: engineering squads. You'll partner directly with the teams building technology across your line of business, helping them design solutions, navigate architecture standards, and build with confidence. You'll also help build our internal automated governance agents, contributing hands-on to the tools that support technology evaluation, PR review, and standards enforcement across the organization. This is an individual contributor role — no direct reports — for someone who leads through influence, expertise, and relationship.

What We Offer:

Direct Engineering Partnership: Serve as the architecture partner engineering squads actually want to talk to — someone who helps them solve real problems, not someone who shows up to gate their work.

Hands-On Contribution to Automated Governance: Build agents alongside the EA team — PR review, ARB submission support, technology evaluation — using your own experience with agent orchestration, observability, and MCP tooling.

Influence Without Bureaucracy: Shape how engineering teams adopt architecture patterns through demonstrated value, not mandate. You earn trust by being useful.

AI-Native Engineering at Scale: Help define how an entire line of business builds software with AI — from coding assistants to agentic development workflows — and set the practices other teams follow.

How You’ll Make an Impact:

Be the Architect Engineers Call First: Provide direct architecture guidance to the engineering squads in your line of business — solution design, trade-off analysis, pattern selection — in the flow of their actual work.

Support ARB and JAD Sessions When It Matters: Step in to help squads prepare when a new technology or a new pattern is entering the picture — pressure-testing the design and reducing back-and-forth before formal review.

Build Agents for the EA Lifecycle: Contribute directly to the agents that power technology evaluation, PR review, standards enforcement, and ARB submission support.

Translate Standards Into Practice: Take architecture principles and the Tech Roadmap (Invest/Maintain/Divest/Research) and make them concrete and actionable for engineers building real systems.

Prototype Before You Recommend: Build working examples of patterns before asking teams to adopt them. Credibility here comes from having built it yourself.

Partner Across Engineering: Work closely with engineering leads to understand their constraints and tailor architecture guidance to their specific context — what works for one squad won't work for all of them.

Champion AI-Based Development: Help squads adopt AI-assisted and agentic development — coding assistants, AI-driven testing, and agentic workflows — and establish the patterns, guardrails, and metrics that let them ship faster with confidence rather than treating AI as a novelty.

Drive Down Technical Liabilities: Use the Tech Roadmap (Invest/Maintain/Divest/Research) and the enterprise architecture graph of dependencies to give squads a clear view of their technical debt — what to retire, what to modernize, and where hidden coupling creates risk before it becomes an incident.

Automate Upgrades and Modernization: Help teams stand up automated dependency upgrades, patching, and modernization pipelines — so keeping systems current becomes a routine, low-effort habit instead of a stop-the-world project.

Own Reference Architectures and Reference Code: Create, curate, and maintain reusable reference architectures and a well-documented reference code base that squads can build from — raising the bar on consistency, quality, and speed across your line of business.

What You Need to Have:

Deep Technical Architecture Experience: A strong record designing and evolving backend/distributed systems architecture, including data modeling and event-driven design, and ideally schema governance, API design, or platform-scale technical standards.

Hands-On Agentic AI Experience: Real experience building AI agents, working with LLMs, and applying agentic patterns — orchestration, observability, tool use — to production workflows.

Influence-Based Leadership: Demonstrated ability to drive adoption across teams without direct authority — earning buy-in through trust and results, not org-chart power.

Customer-Facing Orientation: You think of engineers as your customers. You want to understand their problems and help solve them, not enforce a checklist.

Governance at Scale: Experience defining and evolving technical standards across many teams — knowing how to get consistent buy-in without slowing everyone down.

Track Record Driving AI Adoption: Demonstrated success introducing AI-based development practices — coding assistants, agentic workflows, or developer-productivity tooling — to engineering teams and getting real, sustained usage rather than shelfware.

Technical Debt and Dependency Management: Experience mapping system dependencies and leading modernization or automated-upgrade programs across a codebase or platform.

What Would Make You Stand Out:

MCP and Agent Tooling Experience: Hands-on work building tools that let AI agents discover, query, or act on internal systems.

LLM Observability: Experience standing up or operating observability platforms for LLM agents — traces, cost, safety evaluation.

Cross-Team Schema or API Governance: Experience leading standards work across a large number of engineering teams.

Technical Leadership Through Expertise: A track record of being the go-to technical voice on a team — mentoring and shaping direction through credibility, not title.

Why Choose Fitch:

Hybrid Work Environment: 2 to 3 days a week in office required based on your line of business and location

A Culture of Learning & Mobility: Dedicated trainings, leadership development and mentorship programs designed to ensure that your time at Fitch will be a continuous learning opportunity

Investing in Your Future: Retirement planning and tuition reimbursement programs that empower you to achieve your short and long-term goals

Promoting Health & Wellbeing: Comprehensive healthcare offerings that enable physical, mental, financial, social, and occupational wellbeing

Supportive Parenting Policies: Family-friendly policies, including a generous global parental leave plan, designed to help you balance career and family life effectively

Inclusive Work Environment: A collaborative workplace where all voices are valued, with Employee Resource Groups that unite and empower our colleagues around the globe

Dedication to Giving Back: Paid volunteer days, matched funding for donations and ample opportunities to volunteer in your community

Fitch is committed to providing global securities markets with objective, timely, independent and forward-looking credit opinions. To protect Fitch’s credibility and reputation, our employees must take every precaution to avoid conflicts of interest or any appearance of a conflict of interest. Should you be successful in the recruitment process at Fitch Ratings you will be asked to declare any securities holdings and other potential conflicts prior to commencing employment. If you, or your immediate family, have any holdings that may conflict with your work responsibilities, you may be asked to divest yourself of them before beginning work.

Fitch is proud to be an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, protected veteran status, and other statuses protected by law.

FOR Toronto ROLES ONLY: Expected base pay rates for the role will be between 225,000 and 275,000 CAD per year. Actual salaries will be determined on an individualized basis and may vary based on factors including but not limited to education, training, experience, past performance, and other job-related factors. Base pay is one part of Fitch’s total compensation package, which, depending on the position, may also include commission earnings, discretionary bonuses, long-term incentives, and other benefits sponsored by Fitch.

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