AVP, Business Technology Leader

We’re looking for a Head of Technology to join our Individual Solutions team. As Head of Technology for Individual Solutions, you will shape this business from an early stage and be an architect of Principal’s direct B2C, tech-forward competitive advantage. You will build an innovative wealth management technology platform, a top talent engineering organization, and a nimble, fast paced delivery capability that brings WPI to life. This is not an attempt to recreate what the wealth industry has already built. You will study what others have learned, challenge those assumptions, and help Principal and Individual Solutions think differently. It is an uncommon combination: the builder mandate of a new venture with the assets of a Fortune-scale enterprise behind it. Your accountability is end-to-end. You will lead the Individual Solutions technology organization directly and work across Principal’s federated technology ecosystem to integrate the architecture, platforms, data, security, and shared services the organization and clients depend on. Success is measured by whether the technology works as a coherent system, enhancing client and business outcomes, not by where individual teams happen to report. This is demanding, pioneering work inside a large, matrixed enterprise. Join with eyes open, energized by exactly that challenge. You will operate within a dual reporting structure, reporting to the Individual Solutions business leader and the Retirement & Income Solutions CIO. The role also carries formal accountability to Principal Financial Group’s senior technology leadership for architecture, security, and engineering standards, this includes: Delivery speed, quality, reliability, and technology economics that improve as the business scales. Individual Solutions technology operates as one coherent system across Principal's retirement, wealth, asset management, data, security, and shared platforms. Differentiated customer experiences created through software, data, AI, and advisor augmented delivery. A high-performing engineering organization with strong technical leadership and ready successors. Modern, secure, resilient technology that supports WPI from launch through scale. Fluency at all levels of the organization from engineers and technical execution to strategy and executive stakeholders A clear technology strategy and executable roadmap aligned to WPI business priorities. This role exists to produce six outcomes: Set the technology strategy. Translate Individual Solutions business and product priorities into a clear strategy and an executable roadmap. Own Individual Solutions target and solution architecture within Principal’s enterprise, security, and risk guardrails. Design for scalability, resilience, security, privacy, regulatory requirements, and cost. Make deliberate tradeoffs among speed, architecture, technical debt, and future optionality, and own the outcomes. Lead engineering. Build an organization capable of creating and operating modern customer-facing financial technology. Set a high bar across resilience, speed, design, code quality, testing, automation, DevSecOps, observability, and developer effectiveness. Stay technically fluent and engaged: challenge architecture, pressure-test estimates, and help teams through hard problems. The role demands genuine technical depth. Own delivery across a federated enterprise. Own the end-to-end Individual Solutions delivery outcome across Individual Solutions teams, contributing to Principal's organizations, shared platforms, and external partners. Back commitments with credible technical estimates and explicit capacity from critical contributing teams. Surface dependencies early and drive firm commitments on capacity, timing, and architecture. Drive clarity in priorities, decision rights, and tradeoffs across contributing teams. WPI's success depends as much on disciplined execution as technical excellence. Enterprise complexity is something