Lead Solution Architect

Kestra Financial is undergoing a multi-year transformation to modernize and scale its Salesforce ecosystem across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Financial Services Cloud (FSC), Marketing Cloud, and AI-enabled capabilities. The Lead Solution Architect will serve as the principal solution lead and strategic thought leader, guiding end-to-end solution design, integration strategy, user experience, and solution delivery across Kestra's business units.

This role partners closely with executive stakeholders, product owners, engineering teams, data teams, and third-party vendors to architect scalable, secure, and advisor-centric solutions that drive growth, onboarding, service excellence, and operational efficiency.

What You'll Do:

• Serve as the functional architect for Salesforce initiatives, defining a scalable multi-year architecture aligned to home office, advisor, onboarding, and service strategies.
• Design end-to-end, multi-cloud Salesforce solutions across FSC, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and AI capabilities.
• Translate business and product requirements into well-architected solutions, including data models, user flows, system interactions, and integration patterns.
• Establish and uphold standards for solution design, UX flow, data modeling, documentation, and platform governance.
• Champion architecture that reduces technical debt, improves performance, and supports long-term scalability.
• Partner with Product Owners to shape roadmap priorities, refine epics/user stories, and ensure requirements are actionable, scalable, and aligned to the architecture vision.
• Facilitate discovery and working sessions to define business outcomes, success criteria, and pain points across advisor and internal workflows.
• Act as a trusted advisor to business leaders, articulating solution tradeoffs, risks, and feasibility to support decision-making.
• Perform fit-gap analysis and guide Product Owners on leveraging standard platform capabilities vs. custom design.
• Create solution designs, process flows, mockups, and user stories as needed to support product and engineering teams.
• Provide level-of-effort estimates and inform sprint/PI planning with solution considerations.
• Maintain platform documentation, design artifacts, and solution blueprints.
• Evaluate and recommend new Salesforce features, industry solutions, and AI capabilities (Einstein, predictive scoring, automation, compliant GenAI).
• Promote best practices in security, compliance, data governance, and platform stewardship.
• Provide thought leadership on how Salesforce and AI can modernize business processes and elevate advisor and client experiences.
• Align Salesforce data models with enterprise data strategies, including data lake/warehouse integration patterns.
• Collaborate with technical architects, developers, and integration teams to ensure solutions meet performance, scalability, and security standards.

What You Bring:

• 8+ years of Salesforce architecture and solution design experience.
• Deep expertise in FSC, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud.
• Strong understanding of advisory workflows, financial services compliance, and wealth-management processes.
• Proven ability to design scalable multi-org or multi-business-unit Salesforce environments.
• Experience with API-first integrations between software applications and legacy systems.
• Strong knowledge of data modeling, sharing/security models, and enterprise integration patterns.
• Exceptional communication skills with ability to lead design sessions with executives and product teams.
• Experience influencing senior stakeholders in a complex, matrixed organization.
• Passion for digital transformation, technology innovation, and AI-enabled workflows.
• Strong delivery leadership, change management, and Agile/DevOps experience.
• Experience managing third-party vendors and implementation partners.
• Experience in wealth management, broker-dealer, asset management, or similarly regulated industries.
• Salesforce certifications preferred: Sales Cloud Consultant, Service Cloud Consultant, Platform App Builder
• Familiarity with DevOps tools (Copado, Azure) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Expertise in data governance and compliance (FINRA, SEC, GDPR).

Internal Application Policy:

Internal applicants must be in good standing and have a minimum of 1 year of service with Kestra. Internal applicants must also have a minimum of 1 year service in current role unless approved by EVP.

Benefits to support you:

• Competitive pay and benefits with a large employer (over 1600 employees nationwide)
• 401(k), health insurance, and a competitive benefits package
• Work in a supportive, collaborative environment committed to professional excellence
• Help clients navigate meaningful financial decisions with confidence
• Opportunities for training, development, and long-term growth within the firm
• Tuition reimbursement for qualified expenses

Kestra Values:

Our Mission is Powering Financial Independence, enabling the growth and success of investing clients and the advisors who serve them. We do that by living our values: Serve, Make it Happen, and One team.

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