Director, Enterprise Architecture – Platform & Infrastructure - (Reston - Hybrid) FreeWheel

What you'll do

• Lead, develop, and manage a team of Enterprise Architects for platform, infrastructure, and shared engineering capability architecture
• Define and drive Platform & Infrastructure Architecture vision, operating model, engagement approach, standards, governance, and strategic roadmaps
• Serve as strategic architecture advisor to Executive Director of Enterprise Architecture and CTO organization
• Partner with Platform Engineering leadership to provide strategic direction and enable delivery, operations, and execution of platform capabilities
• Establish architectural direction for cloud and datacenter platforms, compute, Kubernetes, container orchestration, managed control planes, serverless platforms, storage, databases, networking, observability, CI/CD, developer experience, secrets management, identity integration, and internal platform services
• Shape multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructure strategy including architectural guardrails for workload placement, portability, resiliency, operational readiness, cost efficiency, security, and regulatory or business constraints
• Develop and maintain reference architectures, platform standards, target-state designs, architecture decision records, technology lifecycle recommendations, and modernization roadmaps
• Drive platform modernization and rationalization to reduce legacy complexity, technology fragmentation, operational toil, duplicated capabilities, and variance across teams
• Define paved roads and golden paths to improve developer productivity balancing platform consistency, flexibility, reliability, security, and business needs
• Guide architectural direction for observability, logging, tracing, metrics, alerting, service health, SLO practices, reliability engineering, incident learning, and operational excellence
• Partner with Security and Operations to incorporate secure-by-design principles, secrets management, identity, vulnerability management, policy enforcement, auditability, and production readiness
• Partner with Finance, Engineering, and Platform Engineering to embed FinOps and cost-aware architecture practices including cost transparency and usage efficiency
• Influence build, buy, extend, standardize, deprecate, and retire decisions by evaluating and communicating tradeoffs across business value, strategic optionality, architectural fit, resiliency, security, operability, risk, and total cost of ownership
• Evaluate emerging technologies including AI-enabled developer platforms, automation, infrastructure orchestration, and platform engineering tooling and define pragmatic adoption strategies
• Partner closely with Product Architecture to align product architectures with shared platform capabilities, standardized integration patterns, reusable infrastructure services, and clear technology guardrails
• Coach and mentor architects and principal engineers; foster a high-performing architecture community-of-practice
• Exercise independent judgment and discretion in matters of significance
• Maintain regular, consistent, and punctual attendance
• Perform other duties as assigned

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field; advanced degree or equivalent practical experience preferred
• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, cloud architecture, enterprise architecture, or related technology leadership roles
• 5+ years of people leadership experience managing architects, principal engineers, platform architects, infrastructure architects, or comparable senior technical contributors
• Experience defining architecture strategy and roadmaps for large-scale distributed systems, infrastructure platforms, cloud environments, or high-volume digital technology platforms
• Deep knowledge of cloud-native architecture, Kubernetes, containers, serverless, infrastructure automation, networking, storage, databases, observability, CI/CD, developer platforms, and security-by-design practices
• Strong understanding of hybrid infrastructure, datacenter modernization, multi-cloud strategy, workload placement, resiliency architecture, operational readiness, and platform lifecycle management
• Experience leading migrations of large, complex workloads between hyperscalers
• Experience establishing architecture governance, standards, review processes, exception management, reference architectures, and technology decision frameworks
• Experience partnering with Platform Engineering, Infrastructure, Operations, Security, Data, Product Architecture, and senior Engineering leadership
• Proven ability to evaluate architectural tradeoffs across reliability, scalability, performance, security, operability, cost, developer productivity, time-to-market, and organizational readiness
• Experience with FinOps, cost-aware architecture, cloud spend governance, capacity planning, or infrastructure efficiency programs
• Excellent executive communication, stakeholder management, conflict resolution, organizational influence, and talent development skills

Tech stack

Benefits