Job Description

About State Street

State Street is at the heart of financial services, serving institutional investors worldwide through innovative solutions, deep market expertise, and resilient operational platforms. Our success depends on helping clients, employees, investors, and communities achieve strong outcomes through partnership, integrity, and continuous innovation.

Welcome to State Street Alpha

State Street Alpha is a front-to-back asset servicing platform that unifies front office, middle office, and back office capabilities into a single operating model. Built on Charles River IMS and State Street’s core servicing capabilities, Alpha delivers real-time data, investment intelligence, and operational efficiency across the full investment lifecycle, enabling clients to manage any asset class, in any market, at scale.

The New Instrument Architect is responsible for the end-to-end architectural oversight, design validation, and lifecycle governance of new financial instruments onboarded onto the State Street Alpha platform. This role spans the full lifecycle—from product inception and design through build, testing, and production readiness—ensuring functional, technical, and operational alignment across front office, middle office, and downstream servicing functions.

The Architect acts as the central authority for ensuring new instruments are consistently implemented across trading, portfolio management, risk, accounting, cash, and reporting workflows, while meeting regulatory, control, and operational resilience standards. The role partners closely with Product, Engineering, Operations, Client Solutions, and Risk to deliver scalable, repeatable, and well-governed instrument onboarding outcomes.

Primary Job Responsibilities

End-to-End Instrument Architecture & Governance

• Own the architectural definition and validation of new financial instruments across the Alpha front-to-back operating model.
• Define and maintain canonical representations of instrument attributes, lifecycle events, valuation models, and reference data dependencies.
• Ensure architectural consistency across front office (trading, portfolio construction, risk), middle office (IBOR, P&L, collateral), and back-office servicing (accounting, custody, cash).
• Establish architectural guardrails, design patterns, and control points for new instrument enablement.

Lifecycle Oversight (Design → Build → Test → Deploy)

• Lead architecture reviews from initial product definition through production readiness.
• Validate that business requirements are translated into coherent functional and technical designs.
• Partner with engineering and product teams to ensure solutions align to Alpha platform standards and roadmaps.
• Provide architectural sign-off at key lifecycle checkpoints (design approval, test readiness, go-live readiness).

Front & Middle Office Testing Leadership

• Define the end-to-end testing strategy for new instruments, covering front office, middle office, and cross-system integration.
• Ensure comprehensive test coverage including:
  • Trade capture and lifecycle events
  • Valuation, pricing, and risk impacts
  • IBOR, P&L, and position integrity
  • Cash, settlement, and accounting flows
• Review and approve test plans, scenarios, and execution outcomes in partnership with QA, Product, and Operations.
• Support defect triage and root-cause analysis to ensure architectural issues are addressed at source.

Cross-Functional Coordination & Stakeholder Engagement

• Act as a liaison between business stakeholders, product owners, engineering teams, and operations.
• Facilitate architecture working groups and design forums for complex instrument onboarding initiatives.
• Provide clear architectural guidance to client-facing teams during onboarding, change requests, and post-go-live stabilization.

Risk, Controls & Operational Resilience

• Ensure new instruments comply with risk, regulatory, and control frameworks.
• Identify architectural risks and operational failure points early in the lifecycle.
• Embed observability, reconciliation, and control mechanisms into instrument designs.
• Support the firm’s Risk Excellence culture through proactive risk identification and mitigation.

Continuous Improvement & Platform Evolution

• Contribute to the evolution of Alpha’s instrument onboarding frameworks and tooling.
• Identify opportunities to standardize, automate, and accelerate future instrument enablement.
• Apply deep functional knowledge to influence the Alpha product and architecture roadmap.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Computer Science, Business, or a related discipline; advanced degree preferred.
• Extensive experience in financial services architecture, product enablement, or complex platform implementations.
• Strong understanding of front office and middle office workflows, including trading, portfolio management, risk, IBOR, and P&L.
• Hands-on experience with instrument lifecycle management across multiple asset classes (e.g., fixed income, derivatives, repos, structured products).
• Proven experience leading end-to-end testing and production readiness for complex financial systems.
• Ability to communicate complex architectural concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.

Salary Range:

$110,000 - $188,750 Annual

The range quoted above applies to the role in the primary location specified. If the candidate would ultimately work outside of the primary location above, the applicable range could differ.

Employees are eligible to participate in State Street’s comprehensive benefits program, which includes: our retirement savings plan (401K) with company match; insurance coverage including basic life, medical, dental, vision, long-term disability, and other optional additional coverages; paid-time off including vacation, sick leave, short term disability, and family care responsibilities; access to our Employee Assistance Program; incentive compensation including eligibility for annual performance-based awards (excluding certain sales roles subject to sales incentive plans); and, eligibility for certain tax advantaged savings plans.

For a full overview, visit https://hrportal.ehr.com/statestreet/Home

About State Street

Across the globe, institutional investors rely on us to help them manage risk, respond to challenges, and drive performance and profitability. We keep our clients at the heart of everything we do, and smart, engaged employees are essential to our continued success.

We are committed to fostering an environment where every employee feels valued and empowered to reach their full potential. As an essential partner in our shared success, you’ll benefit from inclusive development opportunities, flexible work-life support, paid volunteer days, and vibrant employee networks that keep you connected to what matters most. Join us in shaping the future.

As an Equal Opportunity Employer, we consider all qualified applicants for all positions without regard to race, creed, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, ethnicity, age, disability, genetic information, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, citizenship, marital status, domestic partnership or civil union status, familial status, military and veteran status, and other characteristics protected by applicable law.

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It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.