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

Core Responsibilities

• Lead, develop, and manage a team of Enterprise Architects responsible for platform, infrastructure, and shared engineering capability architecture acrossFreeWheel.

• Define and drive the Platform & Infrastructure Architecture vision, operating model, engagement approach, standards, governance mechanisms, and strategic roadmaps.

• Serve as a strategic architecture advisor to the Executive Director of Enterprise Architecture, helping set priorities, shape the EA agenda, and mature the architecture practice across the organization.

• Serve as the primary Enterprise Architecture partner to Platform Engineering leadership, providing strategic direction while enabling Platform Engineering to own delivery, operations, and execution of platform capabilities.

• Establish architectural direction for cloud and datacenter platforms, compute, Kubernetes and container orchestration, managed control planes, serverless platforms, storage, databases, networking, observability, CI/CD, developer experience, secrets management, identity integration, and internal platform services.

• ShapeFreeWheel’smulti-cloud and hybrid infrastructure strategy, including architectural guardrails for workload placement, portability whereappropriate, resiliency, operational readiness, cost efficiency, security, and regulatory or business constraints.

• Develop andmaintainreference architectures, platform standards, target-state designs, architecture decision records, technology lifecycle recommendations, andmodernizationroadmaps.

• Drive platform modernization and rationalization efforts that reduce legacy complexity, technology fragmentation, operational toil, duplicated capabilities, and unnecessary variance across engineering teams.

• Define paved roads and golden paths that improve developer productivity while balancing platform consistency, flexibility, reliability, security, and business delivery needs.

• Guidearchitectural direction for observability, logging, tracing, metrics, alerting, service health, SLO practices, reliability engineering, incident learning, and operational excellence.

• Partner with Security and Operations to ensure platform strategies incorporate secure-by-design principles,secretsmanagement, identity, vulnerability management, policy enforcement, auditability, and production readiness.

• Partner with Finance, Engineering, and Platform Engineering to embed FinOps and cost-aware architecture practices into cloud and platform strategy, including cost transparency, usage efficiency, and informed tradeoff analysis.

• Influence build, buy, extend, standardize, deprecate, and retire decisions by evaluatingand communicating tradeoffsacrossbusiness value,strategic optionality, architecturalfit, 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 when they create measurable engineering leverage.

• Partner closely with Product Architecture so that product-aligned architectures are grounded in shared platform capabilities, standardized integration patterns, reusable infrastructure services, and clear technology guardrails.

• Coach and mentor architectsandprincipal engineers; foster a high-performing architecture community-of-practicethat raises technical rigor and improves decision quality across Engineering.

• Consistent exercise of independent judgment and discretion in matters of significance.

• Regular, consistent, and punctual attendance.

• Other duties and responsibilities as assigned.
  

Leadership Expectations

• Operate as a people leader first and an architecture leader always: Build an engaged, high-performing Platform Architecture team with clear priorities, accountability, development plans, and strong technical credibility.

• Act as a trusted advisor to the Executive Director of Enterprise Architecture, the CTO, and other Engineering SLT membersbyidentifyingplatform risks, modernization opportunities, organizational friction, and priority decisions requiring executive alignment.

• Architecture partner to Platform Engineering:Provide clear strategic direction, standards, and target-state guidance whilemaintaininga healthy distinction between architecture leadership and engineering delivery ownership.

• Drive decisions to closure:Facilitatehealthy technical debate, make tradeoffs explicit, document decisions, and ensure architecture guidance is actionable and socialized.

• Lead with pragmatism:Balancelong-term modernization, operational risk reduction, and near-term business delivery commitments.

• Raise the level of executive communication:Translate complexplatform, infrastructure, and technology tradeoffs into clear business, risk, cost, and delivery implications for senior stakeholders.

• Foster a culture of inclusion, learning, and continuous improvement across the architecture practice and the broaderEngineering organization.

• Build an inclusive technical culture:Model collaboration, learning, transparency, and respect across Architecture, Engineering, Platform, Operations, Product, Security, and Data teams.
  

Experience and Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a 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+ yearsofpeopleleadership experience managing architects, principal engineers, platform architects, infrastructure architects, or comparable senior technical contributors.

• Demonstrated 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.Prior experienceleadingmigrations oflarge, complex workloads betweenhyperscalers.

• Experienceestablishingarchitecture governance, standards, review processes, exception management, referencearchitectures, and technology decision frameworks across multiple teams or business domains.

• Experience partnering with Platform Engineering, Infrastructure, Operations, Security, Data, Product Architecture, and senior Engineering leadership to align architecture strategy with execution realities.

• 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.
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on familiarity with technologies and practices such as Kubernetes managed control planes, service mesh, API gateways, secrets management, policy-as-code, infrastructure-as-code, observability platforms, automated delivery pipelines, and database platform strategy.

• Experience in AdTech,MarTech, media technology, SaaS, marketplace platforms, digital advertising, or similarly high-scale, low-latency,distributed,data-intensive environments.

• Experience supporting globally distributed engineering organizations and platforms with high availability, high throughput, and complex operational requirements.

• Experience leading or influencing platform engineering transformation, developer experience improvements, internal developer platforms, service catalog adoption, or golden path strategies.

• Experience modernizing legacy infrastructure and application platforms into more modular, cloud-native, automated, and operationally efficient environments.

• Experience with AI-enabled engineering productivity, automation, platform intelligence, or architecture governance tooling.
  

Success Measures

• A trusted Platform Architecture team that is consistently engagedonthe highest-value infrastructure, platform, modernization, and engineering effectiveness decisions.

• Clear, actionable platform architecture roadmaps that align Enterprise Architecture, Platform Engineering, Security, Operations, Data, Product Architecture, and Engineering leadership.

• Measurable improvements in platformcost efficiency,reliability, scalability, resiliency, operability, security posture,anddeveloper productivity.

• Increased adoption of standardized platforms, paved roads, golden paths, reference architectures, and reusable shared capabilities.

• Reduced technology fragmentation, duplicated platform capabilities, infrastructure complexity, operational toil, and unmanaged technical debt.

• Stronger architectural discipline around cloud and datacenter strategy, Kubernetes, observability, databases, CI/CD,secretsmanagement, developer tooling, and internal platform services.

• Improved quality and speed of technology decisionswith aligned stakeholders – through effective governance, documented tradeoffs, clear standards, and pragmatic exception handling.

• A strong partnership model between Platform Architecture and Product Architecture, enabling product teams to deliver business value on a consistent, scalable, secure, and cost-efficient foundation.

• A high-performing architecture organization with strong talent development, credibility, collaboration, and influence across Engineering.
  

Required Skills

• Enterprise Architecture

• Platform Architecture

• Infrastructure Architecture

• Cloud Strategy

• Platform Engineering

• Kubernetes

• Cloud-Native Architecture

• Observability

• Developer Productivity

• Engineering Standardization

• FinOps

• Technology Governance

• Strategic Management

• Stakeholder Management

• Building High-Performance Teams

• Business Leadership
  

Employees at all levels are expected to

• Understand our Operating Principles; make them the guidelines for how you do your job.

• Own the customer experience - think and act in ways that put our customers first, give them seamless digital options at every touchpoint, and make them promoters of our products and services.

• Know your stuff - beenthusiasticlearners, users and advocates of our game-changing technology,productsand services, especially our digital tools and experiences.

• Win as a team - makebig thingshappen by working together and being open tonew ideas.

• Be an active part of the Net Promoter System - a way of working that brings more employee and customer feedback into the company - by joining huddles, makingcall backsand helping us elevate opportunities to do better for our customers.

• Drive results and growth.

• Support a culture of inclusion in how you work and lead.

• Dowhat'sright for each other, our customers,investorsand our communities.