Job Description
The Team Lead, Enterprise Architecture leads a team of Solution Architects within the Enterprise Solutions team, providing hands-on architectural leadership and people management to ensure technology solutions are strategically aligned, value-driven, and built on modern, secure, and well-governed foundations. While the role is rooted in enterprise solutions and application portfolio, the architecture standards, governance practices, and integration patterns the team establishes inform technology decisions across IT.
This role combines the technical depth of solution and enterprise architecture with the coaching, planning, and delivery accountability of a people leader. The Team Lead partners closely with IT and business stakeholders and third-party vendors to guide technology and design decisions from concept through to value realization, while mentoring architects to grow their technical and professional capabilities.
The Team Lead brings a strong working knowledge of enterprise architecture frameworks and best practices (e.g. TOGAF or equivalent) and modern cloud technologies. They maintain a clear view of the current cloud landscape and emerging architecture patterns, applying this knowledge to shape future-state designs and to guide the team’s technical direction. The role reports to the Director, Project Delivery and Architecture, and has two Solution Architects as direct reports. It is suited to a motivated, outcome-oriented leader with a “can do” attitude who is curious, takes a high degree of personal ownership, and demonstrates proactive problem-solving and adaptability in a dynamic environment.
Responsibilities
- Leads, mentors, and coaches a team of two Solution Architects, guiding the development of tailored growth plans that address both technical and soft-skill development.
- Supports succession planning within the team and contributes to a succession plan for own role.
- Ensures the team has clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities, with clear performance expectations documented for each team member.
- Creates and fosters a customer-centric culture across all team interactions.
- Supports the sourcing and allocation of appropriately skilled resources for successful project delivery, including extended delivery vendors and partners where applicable.
- Guides the team in delivering a variety of architecture services with high quality to stakeholders, including future-state architecture designs, product assessments, technical summaries, and roadmaps.
- Defines and maintains enterprise-wide architecture standards, integration patterns, and reference architectures to guide consistent and governed solution delivery across the portfolio.
- Applies enterprise architecture frameworks and best practices to ensure solutions are strategically aligned, consistent, and governed appropriately.
- Reviews and quality-assures architecture deliverables produced by the team, providing constructive feedback.
- Performs and oversees technical analysis of vendor offerings, conveying assessments to stakeholders in business terms with risks, impacts, and mitigation strategies.
- Ensures architecture impacts, risks, and dependencies are identified and communicated, and that architecture recommendations are implemented. Partners with Cybersecurity to support the platform and technology review governance process.
- Creates and promotes clear, engaging visual representations of architectures and solutions using tools such as Visio, Whimsical, Lucid or similar.
- Maintains awareness of the current technology landscape and modern architecture patterns, particularly in application, data/integration, and security domains.
- Owns the IT architecture workstream for M&A integrations by assessing acquired entities’ application landscapes, defining consolidation and sequencing plans, and driving technology stack alignment to organizational standards.
- Acts as a trusted advisor and key point of contact for business stakeholders on architecture.
- Represents architecture to the business, promoting the vision, services, and capabilities.
- Cultivates positive, high-trust working relationships across business and IT functions, balancing multiple stakeholder expectations in a dynamic, time-sensitive environment.
- Excels at explaining complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders, ensuring clarity and understanding.
- Collaborates with other IT teams - including infrastructure, data, integrations, and AI - to ensure architecture alignment and share standards and patterns where applicable.
- Champions innovation culture, including the adoption of AI, within the IT team.
- Leads and participates in innovation pilot projects, supporting idea generation and helping transform business stakeholder concepts into practical, value-realizing solutions.
- Pursues professional development opportunities to maintain knowledge of prevalent and emerging technologies, and shares this knowledge with the team.
Experience And Qualifications
- Understanding of design and integration practices in Cloud / XaaS-intensive environments.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business, or equivalent work experience.
- Understanding of real estate and related business processes across multiple asset classes (office, industrial, retail, residential, and development) is an asset.
- Demonstrated ability to convey complex ideas effectively through storytelling and engaging presentations tailored to varied audiences.
- Demonstrated ability to build strong, high-trust relationships with business leaders, IT colleagues, and partners.
- Strong analytical, verbal, and written communication skills, with excellent facilitation and collaboration abilities at all levels of an organization.
- Demonstrated ability to adapt to a constantly changing environment and to balance multiple stakeholder expectations.
Top Skills Necessary
- Enterprise Architecture & Governance – 3+ years of experience applying TOGAF or equivalent EA frameworks, including architecture standards, reference architectures, governance, future-state roadmaps, and ensuring solutions align with enterprise strategy.
- Hands-on Solution Architecture with an Enterprise Applications Focus - 6+ years of Solution and/or Enterprise Architecture experience, with strong depth across enterprise applications, SaaS/XaaS, application modernization, vendor/product assessment, and end-to-end solution design. The ideal candidate is an Enterprise Architect who has strong roots in hands-on Solution Architecture.
- Cloud Architecture & Cross-Domain Technical Breadth – 3+ years of experience utilizing Azure and modern cloud/application architecture, with enough breadth across integration, cybersecurity, data, infrastructure, and AI to understand dependencies and make enterprise-level decisions. Detailed integration architecture is owned by the Integration team, so deep integration specialization is not required.
- Architecture Leadership & People Development – 3+ years leading/coaching technical professionals, ideally architects, with demonstrated experience reviewing architecture deliverables, setting technical direction, mentoring team members and raising the quality of architecture work.
- Executive Stakeholder & Business Advisory Skills - Proven ability to act as a trusted architecture advisor, translating complex technology decisions into clear business language and communicating options, value, risks, dependencies and recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Salary range $130K - $160K
Affinity Earn
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About Affinity
Affinity Group is a technology and business consulting and services company. We believe in creating long term relationships between clients and consultants that foster a mutually beneficial partnership. Affinity is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit and business need.
For more information on Affinity, please visit www.affinity-group.ca
Job Number: 14157
