Security Architect

Principal Architect, Enterprise Security (Commercial Banking & Payments)

Citizens is seeking a strategic and experienced Principal Architect, Enterprise Security to support our Commercial Banking and Payments domains. This role is responsible for driving secure, scalable, and resilient architecture strategies across cloud, infrastructure, applications, data, and security platforms.

While aligned to the Security organization, this is not a traditional security engineering position. The successful candidate will leverage enterprise architecture principles and industry frameworks to guide technology decisions, influence architectural direction, and embed security throughout the technology ecosystem. This individual will partner closely with senior architects, engineering leaders, and business stakeholders to enable innovation while managing risk and supporting business objectives.

Work Arrangement

Remote work is not available for this position.

Candidates must be willing to commute to one of the following hub locations and work a hybrid schedule consisting of 4 days onsite and 1 day remote per week:

• Phoenix, AZ
• Johnston, RI
• Westwood, MA
• Marlton, NJ

Key Responsibilities

• Define and evolve enterprise architecture strategies aligned to business objectives and cybersecurity goals.
• Partner with line of business architects to ensure cohesive integration of business, application, data, technology, and security architecture domains.
• Develop architecture standards, reference architectures, design patterns, and reusable frameworks that promote consistency and scalability across the enterprise.
• Champion secure by design principles throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Serve as a senior advisor, translating regulatory requirements, security standards, and risk considerations into actionable architectural guidance.
• Collaborate with Infrastructure, Engineering, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and Security leaders to embed architectural controls into platforms, CI/CD pipelines, and operational processes.
• Lead architecture discussions supporting cloud transformation, infrastructure modernization, application development, and data initiatives.
• Evaluate and guide adoption of emerging technologies, including cloud native platforms, identity frameworks, API security, secure data exchange, containerization, and automation solutions.
• Drive alignment between enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, and business strategy.
• Influence technology decisions across a highly matrixed organization through technical expertise, collaboration, and leadership.