Chief Architect, Infrastructure & Enterprise Architecture

Current Employees of Happen Bank: Please apply via your internal Workday Account

Happen Bank (formerly LendingClub) is built around a simple purpose: to clear the way to help people turn intention into action, and action into financial progress. That means offering focused products, a frictionless mobile-first experience, and clear terms with no gotchas. Respect and fairness is part of our DNA, and that ideal shapes how we work, how we treat each other, and how we invest in our employees and our community. Join us in using data, bold thinking, and a commitment to innovation to help clear the way for millions of Americans to achieve more.

About the Role

Happen Bank is seeking a Chief Architect to define and lead the Bank's enterprise architecture strategy, technical standards, and infrastructure architecture. This is a hands-on leadership role, with approximately one-third of the position focused on designing cloud and platform infrastructure, reviewing critical technical decisions, and developing reference architectures that enable Engineering teams to deliver secure, scalable, and reliable solutions.

You'll lead a federated Architecture Guild across business units and directly manage the Shared Architecture team, establishing clear standards, design governance, and alignment across the organization. Working closely with Engineering, Security, Risk, and Regulatory Relations, you'll ensure architecture decisions balance delivery speed, technical quality, and regulatory requirements.

What You'll Do

Enterprise Architecture & Governance

• •Define and maintain Happen Bank's enterprise target-state architecture, aligning the long-term technical vision with business objectives and the Architecture Guild
• •Lead the architecture review process, providing direction and resolving complex cross-domain design decisions while ensuring decisions are documented with clear context, alternatives, and tradeoffs
• •Establish and maintain the enterprise technology standards catalog, including approved and retiring patterns, exception processes, and decision-making authority
• •Partner with Security, Risk, and Regulatory Relations to ensure architecture decisions incorporate appropriate security, control, and regulatory considerations

Infrastructure & Platform Architecture

• •Serve as the Bank's principal infrastructure architect, providing hands-on technical leadership across cloud topology, network segmentation, compute and runtime platforms, resilience, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and cost architecture
• •Develop reference architectures, detailed design documents, and working implementations that Engineering teams can adopt, partnering with infrastructure teams to deliver reusable tooling and solutions aligned with security and compliance standards
• •Lead architecture for major platform initiatives, including the data platform migration to Databricks, ensuring technical decisions support long-term scalability, reliability, and business needs

Architecture Guild Leadership

Lead the federated Architecture Guild, establishing recurring design forums, shared standards, cross-team peer reviews, and consistent architecture practices across business units

Provide functional leadership and mentorship to architects embedded within business-unit Engineering organizations, partnering with Engineering leaders to ensure architectural coverage and alignment between current and future-state designs

Drive architectural consistency while preserving business-unit autonomy and delivery velocity, using clear standards and guardrails rather than unnecessary approval bottlenecks

Identify and address architectural debt, duplicated capabilities, and cross-domain design challenges to improve the efficiency and sustainability of the technology environment

People & Organizational Leadership

Manage, coach, and develop the Shared Architecture team, including Data Architecture, Data Modeling, and Integration Architecture capabilities

Establish clear priorities, delivery expectations, and accountability for architecture designs, standards, and enablement, recognizing the team's impact extends beyond directly delivered software features

Foster a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, sound judgment, and continuous improvement across the Shared Architecture team and broader Architecture Guild

About You

13+ years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, or related technology roles, including 5+ years in a principal, chief, or head-of-architecture position within an organization of comparable complexity

Bachelor's degree or higher, or equivalent combination of education and experience

Deep, current, hands-on expertise in infrastructure architecture, including public cloud environments (AWS preferred), networking, identity, containers and orchestration, infrastructure as code, resilience, and disaster recovery

Demonstrated success providing technical leadership to architects across organizational boundaries, including influencing teams and individuals without direct reporting relationships

Experience directly managing and developing senior technical individual contributors

Strong working knowledge of data architecture, data modeling, integration patterns, and modern data platforms, with the technical judgment to review and challenge complex designs

Experience delivering technology in a regulated financial services environment, including familiarity with OCC, FFIEC, BSA/AML, or equivalent regulatory expectations and their implications for architecture, examinations, and audits

Proven ability to establish enterprise architecture standards, lead complex design decisions, and balance technical rigor, regulatory requirements, and delivery speed

Strong technical communication and collaboration skills with the ability to influence Engineering leaders, architects, Security, Risk, and Regulatory Relations partners

You take ownership of complex technical decisions, apply sound judgment when navigating ambiguity, and establish clear standards that enable teams to operate independently while maintaining architectural consistency

You build functions that evolve, including how AI can improve architectural design, engineering practices, and technical decision-making. You maintain a high standard for responsible use, data governance, security, and human oversight while helping teams adopt new capabilities thoughtfully

Nice to Have

Experience leading architecture within a federated, guild, or chapter operating model

Experience developing architecture patterns that support AI-native workloads and applying AI within enterprise architecture

Experience defining architecture standards that have successfully supported regulatory examinations

Experience operating across both large, established institutions and high-velocity product engineering environments

• Work Location
• San Francisco

The above locations are eligible offices for this role. The locations have been determined to foster in-person collaboration with this role’s team or the related business lines. We utilize a hybrid work model, and our teams are in-office Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. In-person attendance is essential for this role’s success, and remote placement will not be considered. Happen Bank offers relocation, based on actual job level.

• Time Zone Requirements
• Local hours (PT)

While the position will primarily work local hours, Happen Bank is headquartered in Pacific Time and our ideal candidate will be flexible working across time zones when necessary.

• Travel Requirements
• As needed travel to Happen Bank offices and/or other locations, as needed.

• Compensation
• The target base salary range for this position is 260,000-290,000. The base salary of the role will be determined by job-related knowledge, experience, education, skills, and location. Base salary is just one part of Happen Bank's Total Rewards package. You may also