Job Description

You are as unique as your background, experience and point of view. Here, you’ll be encouraged, empowered and challenged to be your best self. You'll work with dynamic colleagues - experts in their fields - who are eager to share their knowledge with you. Your leaders will inspire and help you reach your potential and soar to new heights. Every day, you'll have new and exciting opportunities to make life brighter for our Clients - who are at the heart of everything we do. Discover how you can make a difference in the lives of individuals, families and communities around the world.

Role Title: Assistant Vice-President (AVP), Enterprise Architect, IT Foundation Platforms
Reporting To: Vice-President (VP), Global Chief Enterprise Architect
Location: Toronto or Waterloo or Montreal
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About us

The Global Enterprise Architecture team is dedicated to providing the services and technology our global business partners need to continue to innovate for our clients and help them achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives. Through innovation and collaboration, we're striving to continually find new and better ways to bring value to Sun Life globally.

About the Role

The successful candidate for this role brings motivation, creativity, proven leadership, and expertise executing on enterprise technology solutions. Reporting to the Global Chief Architect, this role provides leadership, facilitation, analysis, and design required for the development of Sun Life’s IT foundations architecture. You will create architectural deliverables that guide the evolution of enterprise technology platforms and infrastructure to enable business strategy and outcomes through sound technical decisions.

What You’ll Be Doing

You will be a champion of change and help accelerate the organization’s digital journey while carefully balancing the need to ensure stability, resiliency, and performance of enterprise systems.

You will work closely with both the Business Group and Global Enterprise Architecture teams to analyze enterprise business context and change requirements to define the future-state technology architecture. This includes defining requirements, principles, models, and standards that guide enterprise technology decisions. The role is accountable for influencing, guiding, and directing outcomes through strong partnerships across IT and the business.

In addition, this role will be responsible for the following:

• Lead a team of technical architects supporting Enterprise Infrastructure and Core IT strategy toward a clear and aligned vision. As Sun Life transforms through the adoption of AI & Agentic Workflow, this leader will grow and shape the architecture team’s culture and direction, demonstrating strong people leadership in a complex, matrixed organization.
• Create a clear vision and associated roadmaps for infrastructure, cloud, and platform technologies, and align both teams and executives to that vision.
• Lead analysis of the current technology environment to identify critical gaps and deficiencies and recommend improvements informed by industry trends and best practices.
• Partner with solution, data, API, and application architects to align infrastructure and platform strategies with business-driven solution architecture.
• Define high-level migration and modernization plans to address gaps between current and future state, recognizing the rapid pace of change across cloud platforms, DevOps tooling, and Agile delivery ecosystems.
• Drive innovation by leveraging new technologies and architectural approaches to modernize, extend, and evolve the existing technology environment.
• Act as an internal and external advocate and thought leader for Cloud, Network, infrastructure, and platform enablement portfolios.
• Lead the research, evaluation, and selection of hardware, software, and platform standards, including assessing organizational and operating-model impacts.
• Develop and maintain a strategic technology roadmap that integrates business strategy, technology trends, and an understanding of the financial services industry.
• Lead architectural governance through internal review forums and stage-gating committees to ensure alignment with enterprise technology roadmaps.
• Identify solution options for major initiatives and partner closely with Infrastructure and Platform leaders to select optimal approaches.
• Unify business and IT strategies through enterprise architecture development and service delivery, leading the communication and adoption of architecture across the organization.

What Experience You’ll Need

This role requires deep technology knowledge and experience across enterprise infrastructure, cloud, platforms, and DevOps Financial services industry experience—gained through large, complex initiatives—is strongly preferred. The ideal candidate has built a career in IT focused on infrastructure, cloud platforms, and modern engineering practices.

Additionally, this role requires strong knowledge of:

• The use of Gen AI, AI, Agentic Workflow in core systems
• Architecture roadmapping skills, frameworks, patterns, and models
• Technology industry vendors, solutions, and emerging trends
• Enterprise technology solutions within insurance, banking, or asset management
• The ability to quickly understand and align with business strategies

What You’re Great At

• Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to engage VP and C-level stakeholders
• Adapting communication style for technical and non-technical audiences
• Navigating complex, matrixed organizations and clearly articulating future-state architecture
• Applying technology trends and emerging capabilities to enable new business and operating models
• Operational knowledge of cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and core cloud services
• Working knowledge of Agile and DevOps tooling and practices
• Balancing long-term strategic direction with near-term delivery needs
• Influencing adoption of technology strategy across shared services teams
• Collaborating with IT and business leaders to drive innovative, enterprise-wide solutions
• Leading and developing high-performing technical teams

Qualifications and Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, IT Management, or a related field
• Minimum 15 years of IT infrastructure and technology leadership experience
• Background in enterprise architecture, infrastructure operations, cloud platforms, or application delivery
• Strong understanding of enterprise technology risk, decision-making, and trade-offs
• Proven ability to operate in high-pressure, high-visibility environments
• Extensive experience with infrastructure systems, cloud platforms (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), networking, virtualization, disaster recovery, business continuity, and infrastructure monitoring
• Strong collaboration skills and a track record of trusted partnerships with business leaders
• High personal integrity, excellent interpersonal skills, and executive-level communication capability
• Experience with vendor management and contract negotiations

As this position is posted in several locations, we specify that bilingualism (French, English, both oral and written) is required for Quebec only as the position includes managing both French and English-speaking staff (Quebec and outside Quebec) and providing daily support to the team.

What’s in it for you?

• Great Place to Work® Certified for Most Trusted Executive Team in Canada – 2025, 2024 and 2023
• Great Place to Work® Certified for Best Workplaces in Canada - 2025
• Canada Order of Excellence for Mental Health at Work® certification from Excellence Canada. Sun Life is one of only four companies in Canada to ever receive this certification – 2024
• Top Work Places® for Remote Work – Monster Canada - 2024
• Great Place to Work® Certified for Best Workplaces in Canada – 2024 and 2022
• Great Place to Work® Certified for Best Workplaces for Women in Canada - 2024
• Flexible hybrid work model. #LI-Hybrid
• Pension, stock and savings programs to help build and enhance your future financial security
• Work and professional development that is united by our Purpose: to help Clients and Employees achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives
• A friendly, collaborative and inclusive culture
• Be part of our continuous improvement journey in developing the next greatest digital enterprise experience.
• Competitive salary and bonus structure influenced by market range data
• The opportunity to move along a variety of career paths with amazing networking potential

The Base Pay range is for the primary location for which the job is posted. It may vary depending on the work location of the successful candidate or other factors. In addition to Base Pay, eligible Sun Life employees participate in various incentive plans, payment under which is discretionary and subject to individual and company performance. Certain sales focused roles have sales incentive plans based on individual or group sales results.

Diversity and inclusion have always been at the core of our values at Sun Life. A diverse workforce with wide perspectives and creative ideas benefits our Clients, the communities where we operate and all of us as colleagues. We welcome applications from qualified individuals from all backgrounds.

Persons with disabilities who need accommodation in the application process, or those needing job postings in an alternative format, may e-mail a request to thebrightside@sunlife.com

We are proud to be a hybrid organization that offers our employees the choice and flexibility to work from both the office and virtually based on the needs of the business, our Clients and you! Several work options are available and can be discussed throughout the selection process depending on the role requirements and individual needs.

We may use artificial intelligence to support candidate sourcing, screening, interview scheduling.

We thank all applicants for showing an interest in this position. Only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

Salary Range:

145,000/145 000 - 235,000/235 000

Job Category:

IT - Application Development

Posting End Date:

26/04/2026