EA Day to Day Activity

🔹 Typical Day-to-Day Activities (Enterprise Architect – Digital Lending Program)

1. Start of Day – Communication & Prioritization

• Read & respond to critical emails from business, compliance, and technology teams.

• Review meeting calendar, prioritize tasks (architecture review, vendor discussion, governance board, sprint ceremonies).

• Check escalations from yesterday (integration issues, compliance queries, infra alerts).

2. Daily Stand-up / Sync with Tech Leads,

• Discuss progress of microservices (KYC, Credit Score, Loan Evaluation, Disbursement).

• Track blockers (e.g., integration delays with credit bureau API, database performance issues).

• Guide them on architecture standards, design patterns, and security guidelines.

 3.Cross-Functional Stakeholder Meeting/Alignment

·        Daily stand-ups or syncs with Business- Lending head, credit, and risk team, Product Owners, Business Analysts, Compliance, and Security teams.

• Clarify functional flows (e.g., credit bureau data enrichment). Capture new requirements (e.g., RBI regulation change, new loan product).

·        Clarify architecture dependencies, unblock issues, and ensure alignment between business requirements and tech delivery.

·        Support data, application, security, and infra architects to keep consistency with enterprise principles.

• Compliance: RBI/SEBI/GDPR → confirm data residency, audit, and encryption requirements. Understand upcoming audits, SEBI/RBI guidelines to embed in architecture.

• Operations: Address performance bottlenecks (e.g., batch vs real-time processing).

• Security: Review identity & access controls (Azure AD, IAM policies).

• Vendors/Partners: Resolve third-party integration issues (credit bureau, payment gateway).

• Product Owners/BA → backlog prioritization, grooming sessions.

• Developers/Tech Leads → clarify design doubts during sprint standups.

4. Architecture & Design Activities

• Review/define end-to-end architecture flows for lending journeys:

  • Loan Application → KYC → Credit Bureau → Risk & Fraud → Loan Decision → Disbursement.

• Validate HLDs & LLDs created by solution architects/tech leads.

• Ensure event-driven flows (Kafka topics, Avro schemas) are aligned with business capabilities.

• Validate data models across Azure SQL MI, Cosmos DB, and Cache for Redis for scalability and compliance.

• Ensure BFSI compliance (data encryption, retention, consent mgmt).

• Review solution blueprints before development teams pick up stories.

• Conduct design review sessions with dev leads.

• Decide cloud services strategy (AKS, API Management, Postgres/SQL, Key Vault, Data Lake, ML models).

• Review NFR designs (scalability, DR, active-active deployment across regions).

5. Governance & Standards

• Define and enforce architecture principles (cloud-native, API-first, secure by design).

·        Maintain capability map → application → microservices mapping.

• Review API contracts, Kafka event schemas, data partitioning.

·        Chair or participate in Architecture Review Board (ARB) to check adherence to standards, regulatory compliance (RBI, SEBI, GDPR).

·        Check if all teams are following architecture principles (12/15-factor app, API-first, DevSecOps).

·        Validate data models against enterprise data standards.

·        Review security controls: encryption, data masking, role-based access, identity federation via Azure AD.

• Track cloud cost reports and recommend optimization (reserved instances, storage tiering, right-sizing).

6. Strategic Responsibilities

• Align technology strategy with business vision of the digital lending program (faster TAT, automation, customer experience).

• Continuously update the architecture roadmap, capability map, and standards for modernization.

• Define and track KPIs/OKRs (loan approval turnaround time, system uptime, fraud detection accuracy).

• Provide strategic advisory to Senior Leadership on cloud adoption, AI integration, and digital-first capabilities.

7. DevOps/ DevSecOps & Delivery Support

• Support development squads when they face integration issues (e.g., KYC API timeout, Kafka lag).

• Collaborate with DevOps team to ensure DevOps/devsecops pipelines for compliance with enterprise standards & enforce policies (security scans, quality gates).

• Resolve bottlenecks in CI/CD deployments and support blue-green or canary releases.

• Participate in release readiness reviews with testing & UAT teams.

• Ensure security controls are in place (RBAC, encryption, vaults, tokenization for PII).

• Track JIRA/Rally tickets tagged as "EA/Architecture dependency".

8. Risk, Compliance & Audit

·        Identify/review/update  enterprise-level risks & mitigation plan→ business, technology, security, operations, people((e.g., latency in active-active replication, dependency on vendor APIs).

• Mitigate vendor lock-in with cloud-agnostic patterns (containerization, Terraform/IaC).

• Escalate high-impact risks (e.g., data privacy breaches, vendor delays) to program leadership.

• Validate audit log frameworks (every lending transaction must be traceable).

• Collaborate with InfoSec on penetration test findings or vulnerabilities.

• Propose mitigations (e.g., caching, async retries, fallback strategy).

• Document RAID log (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies).

9. Innovation, Continuous Improvement & Knowledge Sharing

• Conduct brown-bag sessions on new technology enablers (AI/ML, agentic AI in lending, event-driven designs).

• Drive PoCs for Agentic AI/GenAI (e.g., AI agent for KYC doc verification, loan eligibility advisory).

• Mentor tech leads and architects on DDD, microservices best practices, and cloud-native patterns.

• Explore Kafka streaming jobs + ML fraud models to detect anomalies in real time.

• Keep track of new Azure/AWS/GCP offerings for lending modernization.

• Mentor teams on DDD, microservices, EDA patterns, observability practices.

10. Monitoring & Operations

• Review Grafana/Prometheus/ELK dashboards for microservices health.

• Participate in incident triage if downtime or latency is reported.

• Ensure SLAs/SLOs are being met (loan approval response < 5 sec, batch jobs < 30 mins).

• Conduct RCA reviews with ops/dev teams on recurring issues (Kafka consumer lag, DB bottlenecks).

End of Day Wrap-Up

• Update architecture confluence pages (decision logs, service catalogs, capability maps).

• Send out summary notes or escalations to stakeholders.

• Prepare inputs for next day’s steering committee / governance board.

  
  

👉 This mix reflects the realistic nature of an EA role