Principal Architect, Enterprise Architecture - FreeWheel

About the role

Make your mark at Comcast -- a Fortune 30 global media and technology company. Become part of our award-winning, international engineering team that turns big ideas into cutting-edge products, platforms, and solutions that our customers love. We create space to innovate, and we recognize, reward, and invest in your ideas, while ensuring you can proudly bring your authentic self to the workplace. You’ll do the best work of your career right here.

Success Profile

• Results-driven
• Adaptable
• Inventive
• Entrepreneurial
• Team Player
• Problem-Solver

Responsibilities

Job Summary
Freewheel’s Enterprise Architecture team partners closely with our Product and Engineering organizations to translate target business outcomes and client requirements into scalable product designs and technical solutions – delivered on our cloud-native platforms. You will be a strategic member of the architecture group that will provide recommendations and technology design guidance for Product Management and Technology leadership to drive smart investment across our technology portfolio.

Core Responsibilities

• Serve as the architecture interface between Product and Engineering, converting market and client needs into pragmatic, end-to-end solution designs for Streaming Hub (SSP/ad server), Programmatic Demand (DSP), Audience/Identity, Measurement, and Revenue Science platforms.
• Produce Solution Blueprints, Reference Architectures, and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) that balance speed with long-term maintainability, platform consistency, and extensibility.
• Guide Product-aligned Architecture Roadmaps, sequencing capabilities to deliver measurable business value while reducing technical debt.
• Provide hands-on design leadership for cloud-native (Kubernetes, microservices, data plane/control plane) systems including reliability (SLOs/SLA), observability, security, privacy, and cost controls.
• Shape standards for data contracts, identity, consent, measurement, and programmatic interoperability across buy- and sell-side workflows.
• Identify and lead strategic initiatives to grow our technical capability, reducing tech debt, improve software quality and velocity.
• Establish common practices for teams to ensure end software and systems interact seamlessly with one another
• Advise and support leaders on technical choices and associated risks and rewards on build, buy, extend, customize and deprecate strategies; facilitate architecture reviews; and de-risk delivery with proof-of-concepts and reference implementations.
• Reinforce and voice support for grounding principles to ensure architecture designs are stable, secure, scalable, reusable, and operable.
• Review and ensure Solution Designs produced both internally and by 3rd party suppliers.
• Apply new and innovative ideas to business and technology constraints, champion diversity and innovation.
• Develop strategies and guidelines on cloud governance, tech stack selection, capability development and systems deprecation.

Expectations

• Operate as a product-minded architect who frames design choices in terms of client value, market differentiation, and time-to-impact.
• Raise the bar on platform thinking (shared services, paved roads, golden paths), ensuring we build once and reuse broadly.
• Lead design forums and cross-functional architecture reviews; drive clarity via ADRs and migration plans that teams can execute.
• Balance near-term delivery with long-term modernization (domain boundaries, event-driven patterns, data mesh where appropriate).
• Model pragmatism and coaching—unblock delivery teams, simplify where possible, and document patterns others can follow.
• Drive results and growth. Contribute to measurable operational excellence (availability, latency, quality, resilience, security, cost) tied to business SLAs/SLOs.
• Guide, encourage, and empower teams around you by leaning into problems and encouraging them to do so too. Contribute to talent growth by mentoring architects/engineers and evolving our EA practices and artifacts.
• Knowledge of emerging solutions, systems, applications and tech stacks.
• Respect and promote inclusion & diversity.

Experience Needed

• 10+ years in software architecture/engineering, with 5+ years leading distributed, high-scale, low-latency systems (Go/Java/Scala, gRPC/REST, Kafka/Pub-Sub, columnar/NoSQL stores).
• Designed or led architectures for ad serving and SSP platforms (preferably premium video/CTV), including unified decisioning (direct + programmatic), mediation, forecasting, and yield protections.
• Working knowledge of header bidding, deal types (OpenRTB, PMP, curated deals), supply-path optimization (SPO), and auction transparency.
• Built or integrated with DSP workflows (planning, activation, bidding, pacing/optimization, frequency management, brand safety, measurement).
• Practical grasp of identity & addressability (e.g., first-party graphs, UID2/PPID concepts, clean rooms), and how buyers/sellers align IDs for targeting and measurement (preferably in CTV).
• Architected privacy-centric audience and measurement capabilities—data onboarding, audience building/forecasting, reach/frequency, outcomes—using standardized signals and ID interoperability.
• Kubernetes (multi-cluster, multi-region), service mesh, autoscaling, observability (OpenTelemetry), and resilience engineering; hands-on with at least one major cloud. Experience with multi-cloud architecture a plus.
• Strong security and privacy patterns (OAuth/OIDC, tokenization, encryption, secrets, least-privilege, auditability) and FinOps sensibilities. Hands-on experience with API management and API security standards.
• Proven track record turning ambiguous business needs into roadmaps, blueprints, and execution plans; excellent communication with senior product leaders, engineering, sales, and client-facing teams.
• Bonus: Experience with live events / live linear ad decisioning, SSAI, or programmatic for live sports/news. Knowledge of curated supply strategies and buyer curation tools is a plus.
• Bonus: Working experience with AI/ML and analytics platforms.

Skills

• Infrastructure As Code (IaC)
• Enterprise Architecture (EA)
• Cross-Functional Leadership
• Cloud-Native Computing
• Data Center Technology
• Cloud Architectures

Education

Preferred: Bachelor's Degree