Lead Solution Architect

We are a leading financial services provider committed to making decisions easier and lives better for our customers and colleagues around the world. From our environmental initiatives to our community investments, we lead with values throughout our business. To help us stand out, we help you step up, because when colleagues are healthy, respected and meaningfully challenged, we all thrive. Discover how you can grow your career, make impact and drive real change with our Winning Team today.

Job Description

Are you looking for unlimited opportunities to develop and succeed? With work that challenges and makes a difference, within a flexible and supportive environment, we can help our customers achieve their dreams and aspirations.

Your Opportunity

We are looking for an experienced and highly motivated Senior Solution Architect to join Manulife’s Global Wealth and Asset Management Enterprise Architecture team. The role will push forward GWAMs Cross-Enterprise Solution architecture vision by creating guidance and mechanisms that enable the company to think firm-wide when considering capabilities development. You'll work closely with business, product, and technology partners to translate long-term objectives into designs that fuel firm-wide reuse and convergence. Specifically, you will work within the middle and back-office applications in asset management to define and enhance end-user solutions.

Our Manulife / John Hancock family is going through an exciting, yet challenging metamorphosis. We are transforming from a wise 130-year-old company into an agile 130-year-young company. This is a journey, and to quote T.S. Elliot; “The journey, Not the destination matters...”. On this journey, we expect all to bring their knowledge, skills and experience as a team and, when we don’t know, we will learn.

Within the Manulife family, our team is within Global Wealth and Asset Management and as a division we believe the truth is in the numbers. We believe it’s time to change the investment game. To do it differently by focusing on the value we bring our clients, rather than on the usual topics of performance and fees. We have just surpassed $1 trillion in assets under management with a diverse range of both public and private asset classes. Our division is global and have operations in North America, Asia and Europe and we serve a diverse range of clients from our own on-balance general account assets to institutional, retail and wealth.

The right individual will be a proactive, self-starter that enjoys and thrives when connecting people and technology to solve complex problems at-scale. You will analyze, model, and develop complex and high-level architecture plans that require the integration of multiple technologies and coordination of functional areas across the organization. If you have a passion and skill for long-term end-to-end thinking balanced with crafting architecture increments that enable value for customers now, this opportunity is for you!

The Solution Architecture team within the Enterprise Architecture organization is responsible for defining the building blocks and target-state cross-enterprise vision that helps GWAM avoid duplication and optimize architecture. We are an organization that values diverse and big thinking, rewards both behaviors and delivery, and focuses on growth and continuous improvement - all in support of Manulife’s mission to help clients and one another succeed. This role is a unique opportunity to join a team and company at the beginning of a multi-year platform transformation whose work will have direct impact on company direction, our customers, and our industry.

What you’re good at

• Collaborating with Product and Technology teams to craft architecture that enables business and technology vision.
• Designing for both functional and non-functional qualities, including availability, resiliency, security, privacy, etc.
• Assisting the business in the scoping and planning of upcoming initiatives and roadmap items
• Participating in or leading in producing conceptual, solution, and component-level architectures and associated artifacts.
• Reviewing, advising, and providing feedback on architectures produced within and outside the team
• Business Process modeling and developing data driven solutions
• Pragmatic modernization and leading the end to end solution design and architecture for key company initiatives.
• Developing reference architecture and reference implementation patterns
• Mentoring and growing other technologists within the firm
• Contributing to or leading definition of standards, guidance, and points-of-view that enable engineers to thrive and cross-enterprise thinking to become the norm.
• Helping to develop new and revising governance processes to ensure alignment of a diverse set of technology projects with the enterprise target state vision.
• Presenting architecture and innovative ideas to executive leadership for the purposes of alignment and key decision making
• Connecting your business and technical insights to develop innovative proposals for evolving Manulife’s platforms, introducing new products or capabilities, or improving processes that benefit the firm or its customers.

What you have

• Ability to own architecture and influence strategic direction and vision for the future.
• Desire and ability to understand diverse business domains and develop architectures that meet the current and anticipated business needs across a broad set of partners.
• Ability to evaluate new technologies and know the latest industry trends.
• Good judgment and the ability to handle high pressure situations.
• Experience with and knowledge of common Architecture patterns (e.g. microservices, GoF, SOA, Event sourcing, etc.).
• Experience with data and application integration patterns (Domain-Driven, APIs, messaging, streaming, sync/async).
• Experience addressing operational and non-functional concerns (e.g. horizontal & vertical scalability, performance, maintainability, load distribution, resilience, recovery, security and privacy).
• Experience with Cloud Native (12-Factor) Architecture and Infrastructure Patterns.
• Knowledge of the enterprise technology space: languages, frameworks, techniques, and industry trends.
• Ability (and preference) to work in an Agile environment.
• Ability to devise, develop and apply innovative technology to solutions that would benefit our clients.
• Refined presentation and communication skills and expertise interfacing and communicating effectively with both engineers and executives.
• A strong software engineering and/or architecture background is required.

About Manulife and John Hancock

Manulife Financial Corporation is a leading international financial services group that helps people make their decisions easier and lives better. With our global headquarters in Toronto, Canada, we operate as Manulife across our offices in Asia, Canada, and Europe, and primarily as John Hancock in the United States. We provide financial advice, insurance, and wealth and asset management solutions for individuals, groups and institutions. At the end of 2022, we had more than 40,000 employees, over 116,000 agents, and thousands of distribution partners, serving over 34 million customers. At the end of 2022, we had $1.3 trillion (US$1.0 trillion) in assets under management and administration, including total invested assets of $0.4 trillion (US $0.3 trillion), and segregated funds net assets of $0.3 trillion (US$0.3 trillion). We trade as ‘MFC’ on the Toronto, New York, and the Philippine stock exchanges, and under ‘945’ in Hong Kong.

Manulife is an Equal Opportunity Employer

At Manulife/John Hancock, we embrace our diversity. We strive to attract, develop and retain a workforce that is as diverse as the customers we serve and to foster an inclusive work environment that embraces the strength of cultures and individuals. We are committed to fair recruitment, retention, advancement and compensation, and we administer all of our practices and programs without discrimination on the basis of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, religion or religious beliefs, creed, sex (including pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions), sexual orientation, genetic characteristics, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status, disability, or any other ground protected by applicable law.

It is our priority to remove barriers to provide equal access to employment. A Human Resources representative will work with applicants who request a reasonable accommodation during the application process. All information shared during the accommodation request process will be stored and used in a manner that is consistent with applicable laws and Manulife/John Hancock policies. To request a reasonable accommodation in the application process, contact recruitment@manulife.com.

The annual base salary for this role is listed below.

Salary range is expected to be between

If you are applying for this role outside of the primary location, please contact recruitment@manulife.com for the salary range for your location. The actual salary will vary depending on local market conditions, geography and relevant job-related factors such as knowledge, skills, qualifications, experience, and education/training. Employees also have the opportunity to participate in incentive programs and earn incentive compensation tied to business and individual performance.

Manulife offers eligible employees a wide array of customizable benefits, including health, dental, mental health, vision, short- and long-term disability, life and AD&D insurance coverage, adoption/surrogacy and wellness benefits, and employee/family assistance plans. We also offer eligible employees various retirement savings plans (including pension and a global share ownership plan with employer matching contributions) and financial education and counseling resources. Our generous paid time off program in Canada includes holidays, vacation, personal, and sick days, and we offer the full range of statutory leaves of absence. If you are applying for this role in the U.S., please contact recruitment@manulife.com for more information about U.S.-specific paid time off provisions.