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. 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.

• 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).

3. Stakeholder Alignment

• Business → Lending head, credit, and risk team → clarify functional flows (e.g., credit bureau data enrichment).

• Compliance → RBI/SEBI/GDPR → confirm data residency, audit, and encryption requirements.

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

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

4. 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).

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

5. Execution Support

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

• Review DevOps pipelines for compliance with enterprise standards.

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

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

6. Risk, Compliance & Audit

• Identify enterprise-level risks → business, technology, security, operations, people.

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

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

• Collaborate with InfoSec on penetration test findings or vulnerabilities.

7. Innovation & Continuous Improvement

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

• 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.

8. 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).

9. 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