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

Responsibilities

• Lead, develop, and manage a team of Enterprise Architects responsible for platform, infrastructure, and shared engineering capability architecture across FreeWheel.
• 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.
• Shape FreeWheel’s multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructure strategy, including architectural guardrails for workload placement, portability where appropriate, 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 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.
• 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 ensure platform strategies 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 into cloud and platform strategy, including cost transparency, usage efficiency, and informed tradeoff analysis.
• 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 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 architects and principal engineers; foster a high-performing architecture community-of-practice that raises technical rigor and improves decision quality across Engineering.

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 members by identifying platform 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 while maintaining a healthy distinction between architecture leadership and engineering delivery ownership.
• Drive decisions to closure: Facilitate healthy technical debate, make tradeoffs explicit, document decisions, and ensure architecture guidance is actionable and socialized.
• Lead with pragmatism: Balance long-term modernization, operational risk reduction, and near-term business delivery commitments.
• Raise the level of executive communication: Translate complex platform, 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 broader Engineering 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+ years of people leadership 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 experience leading migrations of large, complex workloads between hyperscalers.
• Experience establishing architecture governance, standards, review processes, exception management, reference architectures, 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.