Enterprise Solutions Architect

Job description

Enterprise Solution Architect Full-Time W-2 | Fully Remote (U.S.) | Federal Civilian Practice The Problem We're Hiring You to Solve Most architects know systems. A few know mortgage. Almost none understand it from both sides of the table: the lender and servicer technology that originates and manages loans, and the federal agency that guarantees those loans and holds industry accountable. We are hiring one of the few. You will own the enterprise and solution architecture for the modernization of a federal home loan benefit program, translating statute, policy, and two decades of accumulated business rules into a modern platform while the 20-year-old legacy system keeps running underneath it. If you can hold the loan lifecycle and the oversight lens in your head at the same time, keep reading. The Opportunity This program is replacing the technology behind a nationwide home loan guaranty operation. That means origination-adjacent workflows, servicing oversight, loss mitigation, claims, grants, analytics, and the data exchanges that connect a federal agency to thousands of external lender and servicer users. The target platform is Salesforce-centered, supplemented by serverless capabilities in a government cloud. The legacy platform stays alive, integrated, and secure until the modern one absorbs its functions and the bridges between them come down. Your job sits at the point where all of it must cohere. Requirements arrive as business needs, policy decisions, and process flows. Development teams need buildable designs with traceability, data models, integration specifications, and test strategies. The customer needs an architect who can explain why a design decision protects the program, not just how it works. And the whole effort runs on a fast clock: intake requests turn into executable plans in days, releases ship monthly, and architecture decisions that stall become delivery risks with your name on them. This is not an ivory-tower architecture role. Your designs get built, deployed, and measured within weeks of leaving your hands, and you stay accountable for whether they hold up in production. Why the domain requirement is real. Plenty of strong architects can design an integration. Very few can look at a servicing data exchange and know which fields carry regulatory weight, why the agency needs lineage on a particular data element, or where a workflow change quietly breaks a downstream claim calculation. This program moves too fast to teach you mortgage while you architect it. We need someone who walks in fluent. What You'll Own The target-state architecture. Define and defend one coherent enterprise architecture across the product line: legacy systems, the modern platform, and everything bridging them. Teams and the customer should make decisions against your picture of where the program is going, not their own private versions of it. Solution designs that survive contact with development. Turn approved requirements into complete solution packages: architecture and state diagrams, data models, API and interface specifications, integration designs, and test strategies with full traceability back to the business need. The bar is that development builds from your package without re-litigating it. The configure-versus-customize line. The program mandates out-of-the-box and configuration-first solutions, with custom code as an approved exception. You decide what is configured, what is customized, and why, and you defend those calls to the customer's change authority with evidence. Data architecture and lineage. Own the logical and physical data models, data dictionaries, and the migration and bridging strategy that moves a 20-year accumulation of loan data into the modern platform without breaking the processes still running on the old one. Design data governance enforcement in, not around. Industry-facing integration architecture. Design the APIs, batch exchanges, and system-to-system transfers that connect the agency to lenders, servicers, and partner systems. Fluency in mortgage data standards such as MISMO is part of the job. Resilience, self-recovery, and monitoring are design requirements, not operational afterthoughts. The legacy decommissioning roadmap. Sequence which functions move when, design the bridge services that keep both platforms consistent during the transition, and plan the retirement of every bridge you create. Fast, credible solution judgment. New needs enter through a formal intake process that produces an executable plan, with scope and level of effort, in days. Your architecture instincts have to be right at speed, and honest about uncertainty when they cannot be. Security and compliance as design inputs. Zero Trust alignment, accessibility, data protection, and authorization evidence get engineered into your designs from the first diagram, because retrofitting them is how federal programs lose months. The architecture bar for the program. Run design reviews, mentor engineers and analysts on architectural thinking, document the standards, and hold the line on them, including against pressure from delivery deadlines. AI-Native Architecture AI is part of how PhoenixTeam works, and this role has more to gain from it than most. We are looking for someone who already uses tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot, or comparable AI tools, as a working part of their practice. For an architect on this program, the leverage looks like: analyzing legacy code and data structures to recover business rules that exist nowhere else, accelerating the production of data models, interface specifications, and architecture documentation, pressure-testing designs against edge cases before development finds them, and prototyping integration patterns in hours instead of weeks. You will also help decide where AI belongs inside the solutions themselves, and where it does not, given federal security, data, and authorization boundaries. Two things anchor all of it. Judgment stays human: you know when AI output is wrong, incomplete, or inappropriate for a federal system of record, and you review accordingly. And boundaries are non-negotiable: federal environments govern what tools may touch government code, systems, and data. Use AI wherever it creates leverage, and understand the security, data, privacy, and authorization boundaries governing where and how it can be used. What Great Looks Like Twelve months in, we would expect to see: The program has one architecture, and people use it. Your target-state model is the reference for customer decisions, intake sizing, and development sequencing, and it stays current as reality moves. Solution packages flow into development without rework. Designs carry full traceability, teams build from them directly, and re-litigation of settled architecture decisions has become rare. Legacy knowledge is captured, not trapped. Business rules that lived only in old code and long memories are documented, validated with the customer, and reflected in the modern designs, with AI-assisted analysis doing real work in the extraction. The data bridge is boring. Legacy and modern platforms stay consistent through the transition, migrations prove out with real conversions, and no one fears the bridging layer. The custom-code footprint stayed small. Configuration-first held under pressure, and every exception has a documented, defensible reason. Industry integrations ship clean. Lender and servicer exchanges deploy with resilience and monitoring designed in, and partner onboarding does not require heroics. The customer treats you as a trusted advisor. Architecture decisions that once took quarters now take days, because the customer trusts the reasoning behind your recommendations. The team thinks architecturally. Engineers and analysts you have mentored make better design decisions without you in the room. What You Bring We care about evidence more than resumes. Expect us to ask which platforms you have architected, which mortgage workflows you know cold, what a design of yours looked like two years into production, and how AI functions in your practice today. Deep mortgage domain expertise. This is required. You know the loan lifecycle from origination through servicing, loss mitigation, and claims, and you understand the data, the regulatory pressure points, and the industry participants at each stage. We will not teach you mortgage. We will expect you to teach us things. The dual perspective. The strongest candidates have seen mortgage from the commercial side, in lender, servicer, or vendor technology, and from the federal housing agency side, where guaranty, insurance, and oversight programs set the rules industry builds to. If you have both, say so early and loudly. If you have one deeply and genuine fluency in the other, we want to talk. Enterprise and solution architecture track record. You have owned target-state architectures, designed complex integrations and data migrations, and produced design artifacts that real teams built real systems from. You are fluent across application, data, and integration architecture, not just one. Federal delivery credibility. You have designed within regulated federal environments, or delivered technology to federal housing programs, and you treat authorization, security controls, accessibility, and documentation requirements as design constraints rather than obstacles. Legacy modernization scars. You have decomposed an aging system, extracted its rules, and sequenced its replacement while it stayed in production. You know which parts of that go wrong and how to see them coming. Demonstrated AI-in-the-loop practice. You can show us, concretely, how AI tools accelerate your architecture and analysis work today. Communication that spans the room. You can translate statute and policy into architecture for engineers, and architecture into consequences for executives and program officials, in the same meeting. Judgment under ambiguity. You commit to defensible designs on incomplete information, document your assumptions, and revise without ego when the facts change. U.S.-based, and able to obtain and maintain a federal Public Trust clearance. We do not screen on degrees or year counts. If your evidence is strong, we want to talk. Helpful, Not Required Salesforce platform architecture experience, or architecture on a comparable configuration-first enterprise platform. A strong architect can learn the platform. The domain is the hard part. Hands-on work with MISMO dataset versioning, URLA, or other mortgage data standards implementations. Experience with VA loan guaranty, FHA, USDA rural housing, or GSE programs and systems. Serverless architecture in AWS GovCloud or similar government cloud environments. Prior support of authorization packages, Zero Trust initiatives, or federal data governance programs. Leadership Expectations This role leads through architecture, and that is real leadership, not a consolation prize. You own technical direction that dozens of engineers execute against. You chair design reviews, set and enforce architecture standards, and mentor the people around you into stronger design thinkers. You work directly with federal customers and program decision-makers, which means presenting hard tradeoffs plainly, defending recommendations with evidence, and respectfully challenging direction that will hurt the program, including ours. Silent disagreement is a failure mode here. When requirements are ambiguous, and in a modernization of this age and scale they often are, you make the call, document the reasoning, and own the outcome. You'll Probably Love This Role If... You are the architect who gets pulled into every mortgage conversation because you actually understand the business, not just the systems. You find a 20-year-old loan platform fascinating rather than frightening, because you know its rules encode decisions someone needs to understand before they can be replaced. You want your designs built within weeks, not filed within binders. You like the customer in the room. And you have already made AI a working part of your practice, because analyzing legacy systems by hand stopped making sense to you a while ago. This May Not Be the Role for You If... We would rather you self-select now than be unhappy in month three. You may struggle here if you: Know architecture but not mortgage and hoped to learn the domain on the job. Prefer producing architecture documents to being accountable for what gets built from them. Need requirements fully settled before you can commit to a design direction. Default to custom code when configuration would do. Avoid challenging technical or program decisions, especially with customers. Treat security, accessibility, and compliance as someone else's design problem. View AI as a novelty rather than a working capability. Stopped learning when you became senior. None of that makes someone a bad architect. It makes them a bad fit for this particular job. Why PhoenixTeam You will be among people who speak your language. PhoenixTeam is a woman-owned small business founded and led by housing finance technologists who still do the work. Our teams have spent years embedded inside federal housing programs, from loan guaranty to rural housing lending to mortgage insurance, with real depth in origination, servicing, loss mitigation, and the data standards underneath them. Your domain expertise will be recognized here, not explained here. Your architecture has visible consequences. This is the defining technical role on a major federal modernization where designs are built, deployed, and measured monthly. Impact is not hypothetical here. Direct customer access. You work with federal decision-makers yourself. Your technical judgment reaches the people who act on it, without three layers of translation in between. You set the direction. You are defining the target architecture for this program, not inheriting someone else's and annotating it. AI-native is practice, not positioning. AI is part of how PhoenixTeam delivers, and we fund ongoing AI education and development for the entire team. In this role you will build on that investment, not fight for permission to use it. Fully remote . Competitive salary and 100% employer-paid medical insurance. Mission you can explain at dinner. The platform you architect supports a home loan benefit for the people who served this country. Position Requirements Full-time W-2 employment with PhoenixTeam. Must be based in the United States. Fully remote. Work supports a federal civilian agency. Must be able to obtain and maintain the required federal Public Trust clearance. A Secret clearance is not required. Deep mortgage industry domain expertise is required for this position. PhoenixTeam is a woman-owned small business focused on federal and commercial housing finance technology.