Lead Solution Architect at Kestra Financial in Tempe, AZ

Lead with Purpose. Partner with Impact.
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).