Staff Solution Architect

Staff Solution Architect

Live Oak Bank is a digital bank that serves small business owners across the country. Our groundbreaking spin on service and technology has fueled our mission to be America's Small Business Bank. Our products help customers buy, build, and expand their business, and our high-yield savings and CD products help them grow their hard-earned money. At Live Oak, we never lose sight of the well-being of our people. We believe our employees are the heart of our company. Our commitment to our customers and culture is intertwined, and we seek those who embody and embrace what it takes to empower the American dream.

The Staff Solution Architect at Live Oak is a senior, judgment driven role focused on guiding the organization through architectural complexity at scale. This role is designed for architects who have lived through growth, tradeoffs, and change in fintech or financial services environments and know that the hardest architectural problems are as much about people and decisions as they are about systems.

Reporting to the Director of Enterprise Architecture, this architect operates at the intersection of business strategy, technology, and organizational design. Rather than owning individual components or producing artifacts in isolation, the Staff Solution Architect influences how architectural decisions are made, socialized, and sustained across teams, vendors, and platforms - especially as Live Oak continues to scale and responsibly adopt AI-enabled systems.

Success in this role is measured by influence, clarity, and outcomes: aligning teams, navigating ambiguity, and helping the organization ship well-reasoned solutions without slowing momentum.

Solution Design & Architecture

• Lead end-to-end solution architecture for major projects involving complex, multi-system environments and cross-functional business units.
• Conduct architectural evaluations and analyze the existing technology environment to inform solution design decisions.
• Define solution prototypes, reference architectures, and integration patterns that ensure consistency, scalability, and maintainability.
• Evaluate and recommend technologies, platforms, and vendors, balancing innovation with pragmatism and long-term sustainability.
• Ensure all solution designs comply with enterprise architecture standards, principles, and strategic guidelines.

Cross-Functional Orchestration & Collaboration

• Serve as the connective thread between internal software engineering, data, IT, and infrastructure teams and external vendors, ensuring all parties are aligned on the solution vision.
• Define collaboration frameworks that bring the right people together at the right time to resolve technical questions and design challenges.
• Facilitate solution design sessions, technical reviews, and architecture discussions that drive toward clear, well-documented outcomes.
• Partner closely with project management to align integration strategies with project objectives, timelines, and budgets.

Documentation & Communication

• Tell the story of how individual components come together into a cohesive solution—translating complex technical architectures into clear narratives for diverse audiences including executive leadership, business partners, and engineering teams.
• Develop and maintain comprehensive solution documentation including architecture diagrams, integration maps, decision records, and technical specifications.
• Communicate technical aspects, risks, trade-offs, and progress with clarity and confidence to stakeholders at all levels.

Delivery & Risk Management

• Define procedures and processes that ensure successful solution delivery from design through implementation.
• Identify, evaluate, and mitigate technical risks across the solution lifecycle, including performance, security, and user experience considerations.
• Oversee solution development to ensure adherence to architectural intent, quality standards, and regulatory requirements.
• Analyze and address technical and business requirements, ensuring solutions are right-sized for the problem at hand.

How You'll Do It

• By orchestrating—not dictating. You pull the right people into the room, facilitate productive discussions, and synthesize diverse inputs into a clear path forward.
• By communicating with precision and empathy. You translate technical complexity into language that resonates with engineers, business leaders, and vendors alike, using influence and negotiation to drive alignment.
• By taking responsibility for projects from inception to completion, managing expectations across a broad set of stakeholders and influencing outcomes without direct authority.
• By developing innovative problem-framing approaches that enhance efficiency and help teams see challenges from new angles.
• By maintaining a relentless focus on detail—understanding that the success of a complex solution depends on constant, consistent evaluation of every component, no matter how small.
• By staying current with emerging technologies, industry trends, and architectural best practices in financial services, and recommending adoption where it creates genuine value.
• By executing and adapting established processes through cross-functional collaboration to achieve organizational goals, and identifying gaps that need to be addressed for continuous improvement.
• By building trust and credibility through deep technical knowledge, strong people skills, and a track record of delivering well-managed, well-documented solutions.
• Maintain a high standard of regulatory awareness including BSA, AML, CIP, and OFAC

Required Experience

• 10+ years in technology roles, with experience as a senior or staff level architect in fintech or financial services environments.
• Hands-on experience scaling platforms and teams, including navigating architectural tradeoffs, organizational complexity, and change at growth stage companies.
• Proven ability to influence decisions without direct authority, aligning engineers, business partners, and vendors in ambiguous situations.
• Extensive knowledge of integration architecture patterns, including APIs (REST, GraphQL), messaging systems, event driven architecture, and enterprise integration platforms.
• Broad technical fluency across application development, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure), data architecture, infrastructure, and security - able to credibly guide and challenge architectural decisions.
• Experience working in complex, multi-system, multi-vendor environments under regulatory constraints.
• Comfort reasoning about AI-enabled systems and their architectural, data, and risk implications in regulated settings.
• Clear, confident communicator who can translate complex technical topics for both technical and non-technical audiences.

Our Values

• Dedication: Possess a deep commitment to Live Oak Bank's mission and core values, exemplified through a strong work ethic, adaptability and pride in your work.
• Ownership: Take initiative to deliver positive results by proactively and creatively solving problems, while maintaining a high degree of quality.
• Respect: Treat everyone with courtesy, politeness, and kindness.
• Innovation: Embrace fresh ideas and fearlessly contribute new solutions to emerging or existing problems.
• Teamwork: Foster collaboration, accountability, and trust with others and understand that together, we do more