Architect of Software Engineering

MetLife Legal Plans is the country's largest provider of legal voluntary benefits, committed to providing excellent care to their plan members. The Architect of Software Engineering is responsible for designing and governing enterprise-grade applications that align with organizational strategy and technology standards, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, and maintainable while leading the transition to microservices-based systems.

Responsibilities:

• Architecture Design & Modernization
• Create 3-year roadmaps aligning Line of Business strategic and tactical needs with modern enterprise architecture
• Define and maintain application architecture standards and patterns consistent with MetLife best practices
• Own reporting for Enterprise Application Inventory
• Contribute to broader MetLife Enterprise Architecture community in developing standards and supporting architectural governance
• Lead migration strategy from monolithic applications to a microservice architecture, ensuring modularity, scalability, faster/parallel development cycles, easier roll-back and patching, and reduced deployment risk
• Embed automated remediation in application architecture: actions such as container restarts, failover, or scaling executed via orchestration tools (e.g., Kubernetes) must be factored into future state designs
• Create application resilience by design: future state architectures must have built-in redundancy, be fault-tolerant, and support “self-healing” by leveraging continuous monitoring, anomaly detection, and rule-driven automated responses
• Design solutions using ReactJS for front-end, Django for back-end, and PostgreSQL for persistence
• Define API-driven architecture and REST/GraphQL integration
• Design secure, performant communication between client and server
• Embed authentication flows (JWT, OAuth) and session management
• Establish UI/UX guidelines leveraging Material UI for consistency and accessibility
• Create component-based designs and UI/UX best practices
• Design scalable, reusable UI components aligned with enterprise branding
• Embed state management (Redux, Context API) and performance optimization for large-scale apps
• Define application data architectures that support downstream business intelligence and analytics
• Apply advanced SQL, indexing, and query optimization
• Support data modeling for relational systems and handling of large datasets
• Implement ACID compliance (Atomic, Consistent, Isolated Durable) transaction architecture, and scalability strategies
• Ensure data models and workflows enable transaction auditability and compliance reporting
• Embed data governance principles into application design to maintain integrity and traceability across services
• Business Understanding & Automation
• Collaborate with business stakeholders to understand product and service offerings
• Translate business processes into data-driven rules and automated workflows
• Ensure architecture supports business intelligence, analytics, and decision automation
• Integration & Interoperability
• Ensure seamless integration with enterprise systems, APIs, and third-party services
• Define API-first design principles and implement secure, reusable services
• Performance & Security
• Implement best practices for application security, including OWASP standards
• Optimize application performance across front-end and back-end layers
• Collaboration & Leadership
• Partner with product and engineering teams to translate business requirements into technical solutions
• Mentor developers on architectural principles, microservices design, and coding standards
• Governance & Compliance
• Enforce coding standards, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing frameworks
• Ensure compliance with enterprise security and regulatory requirements

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in CS, MIS, or equivalent required
• 10+ years' experience building web applications, ideally with experience in both small and large companies
• Prior experience in Microservices Architecture
• Ability to break up larger application repositories into microservices
• Prior significant exposure to MaterialUI / ReactJS, Django ORM / Framework, PostgreSQL / Redshift
• Prior experience in software development and systems architecture
• Experience leading enterprise system architecture and interfacing with product and design functions
• Ability to effectively cross-collaborate with internal and external stakeholders
• Familiarity with modern web development tools and frameworks, including AWS and Azure
• Strong leadership skills and an aptitude for developing a high-performing culture
• 5+ years prior experience in systems and software architecture
• 12+ years prior experience in software development
• Master's degree in CS, MIS, or equivalent
• Familiarity or experience with legal, financial, and/or insurance technology products and applications
• Agile or Scrum certifications