Domain Architect — Health & Benefits (H&B)

Howden • Rayne Township, PA

4d • $225,000 - $275,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

As the Domain Architect — Health & Benefits, you will own the technology design, architecture and strategic roadmap for the H&B line of business. You will design and deliver a future-state, fully integrated, AI-enabled platform and collaboration model that supports end-to-end client and colleague journey maps for H&B. This role is both strategic and hands-on, you will define architecture standards, lead vendor selection, prototype AI/agentic solutions, and deliver reference architectures and guardrails to accelerate H&B transformation. You will partner with business, operations, analytics, security, product and engineering teams to ensure our H&B technology stack is secure, compliant, scalable, and optimized to create differentiated client experiences and a colleague-centric workplace.

Requirements

• 15+ years in enterprise/solutions architecture or technology leadership, preferably with experience in benefits, health, insurance, HR tech or healthcare.
• Proven experience designing cloud-native architectures (Azure strongly preferred; experience with Databricks) and with Data Lake/Lakehouse patterns.
• Deep knowledge of integrations: APIs, event streaming (Event Hubs/Kafka), API Management.
• Demonstrable experience with LLM architecture, RAG designs, vector DBs, knowledge graphs, and agent orchestration.
• Strong background in designing secure systems for regulated industries (HIPAA, SOC2, ISO27001, GDPR) and applying compliance controls.
• Track record of vendor evaluation and integration of best-of-breed SaaS platforms and custom systems.
• Excellent communicator and stakeholder influencer with experience presenting to executive leadership.
• Strong engineering judgement and ability to lead greenfield programs while establishing sustainable engineering practices.
• Strategic thinker with an entrepreneurial, product-driven mindset.
• Comfortable in ambiguity and able to translate business journeys into executable technical strategies.
• Strong collaborator: able to work with consulting, product, data science, security and engineering teams.
• Hands-on: able to prototype, review code/design and accelerate delivery when needed.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Regulated Health Data (MarketScan or similar), benefit administration systems, Avante/Certilytics, Zywave or BenAdmin vendors.
• Prior exposure to implementing Unity Catalog / Databricks serverless or similar privacy-preserving technologies.

Responsibilities

• Own the H&B domain architecture and roadmap, from strategy to tactical delivery.
• Produce an end-to-end future-state architecture that maps directly to client & colleague journey maps.
• Define canonical data models, integration patterns and API contracts consistent with the Digital Backbone architecture and Howden Intelligence layer.
• Design agentic and human-AI collaboration architectures: RAG agents, LLM orchestration, human-in-the-loop, and approval flows.
• Define MLOps & model governance, model registry, feature store, explainability, fairness checks, drift detection, and deployment patterns.
• Lead prototyping of AI use cases across H&B (quote / SBC comparison, loss run standardization, member cost prediction) and convert prototypes to production blueprints.
• Architect robust integrations between CRM (Howden Client), AMS/broking systems (Applied Epic / Plansight), Benefit Administration systems, client portals, and employee experience platforms.
• Design message/event-based and API-first integration patterns using Azure Integration Services, API Management, Event Hubs or equivalent.
• Design orchestration for long-running workflows and synchronous APIs for client/producer UIs.
• Define how large data feeds (MarketScan, claims, pharmacy, provider data) integrate into the data lake/lakehouse (Databricks Delta) for H&B analytics.
• Specify ingestion patterns, bronze/silver/gold pipelines, feature engineering pipelines and offline/online feature serving.
• Design secure architectures for regulated data: data residency, encryption (at rest/in transit), key management (Key Vault), identity (Entra ID/AAD), RBAC, audit trails and logging.
• Ensure architecture meets SOC2/ISO27001 / HIPAA / GDPR / state laws and supports compliance reviews and audits.
• Define governance for partner data (Unity Catalog, Delta Sharing), data anonymization, and access controls for LLM usage.
• Lead vendor evaluations and vendor-ecosystem decisions (buy vs build), create procurement artefacts and drive commercial/technical evaluations.
• Work cross-functionally with Product, Consulting, Data Science, Security and Engineering to deliver architecture into roadmaps.
• Create architecture patterns, runbooks, reference implementations and acceptance criteria for engineering teams.
• Mentor and guide engineers, data scientists and solution architects in the H&B domain.
• Communicate complex technical decisions to CXO stakeholders and business leaders in business terms

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including healthcare savings and reimbursement accounts
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Flexible Paid Time Off and paid parental leave
• Life and Disability insurance

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed