Senior Director, Enterprise Architecture – AdTech - FreeWheel

Core Responsibilities

• Lead, develop, and manage a team of Enterprise Architects who align to Product domains and partner closely with Engineering teams across FreeWheel’s AdTech platforms.
• Define and drive the Enterprise Architecture vision, operating model, and engagement approach for Product-facing EA, ensuring architecture work is tightly connected to business outcomes, product strategy, and delivery priorities.
• Serve as a strategic technology advisor to Product Management and Engineering leadership, translating market opportunities, portfolio priorities, and client requirements into actionable architecture direction and investment recommendations.
• Oversee creation of solution blueprints, reference architectures, architecture decision records (ADRs), roadmaps, and target-state designs that improve consistency, reuse, and execution quality across the portfolio.
• Establish and run effective architecture governance mechanisms, including design reviews, decision forums, standards management, exception handling, and architecture lifecycle oversight.
• Guide architectural direction for distributed, cloud-native systems spanning ad serving, SSP, DSP, audience/identity, measurement, revenue science, APIs, and data platforms.
• Ensure architectural strategies balance speed of delivery with long-term maintainability, operability, resiliency, privacy, security, interoperability, and cost efficiency.
• Partner with Infrastructure & Platform Architecture to ensure products and solutions are consistent with EA’s technical direction on platform modernization, domain boundaries, integration patterns, event-driven architectures, data contracts, and shared platform capabilities.
• Shape portfolio-level roadmaps that reduce technical debt, rationalize legacy patterns, and create reusable platforms, paved roads, and golden paths for engineering teams.
• Influence build, buy, extend, customize, and retire decisions by evaluating business value, complexity, architectural fit, risk, and total cost of ownership.
• Take part in identifying opportunities to apply generative AI and agentic AI across product and internal workflows. Play a lead role in establishing architecture guardrails for governance, privacy, security, evaluation, and human oversight.
• Drive measurable improvements in architecture maturity, engineering effectiveness, software quality, system reliability, scalability, security posture, and cost transparency.
• Represent Enterprise Architecture in senior leadership forums and cross-functional planning processes; contribute to strategic planning, portfolio prioritization, and major initiative reviews.
• Coach and mentor architects and senior technical leaders, helping grow talent, improve architectural rigor, and create a high-performing, collaborative architecture community.

Leadership Expectations

• Operate as a people leader first and an architecture leader always: Build an engaged, high-performing team with clear priorities, accountability, and development plans.
• Create clarity for both Product and Engineering by framing architecture choices in terms of customer value, market differentiation, technical risk, and time-to-impact.
• Raise the bar on enterprise and portfolio thinking by promoting reuse, standardization, and platform leverage without slowing innovation.
• Lead with pragmatism: Enable teams to deliver near-term commitments while steadily driving modernization and reduction of architectural friction.
• Influence through credibility, relationships, and thoughtful decision-making across organizational boundaries rather than relying solely on authority.
• Foster a culture of inclusion, learning, and continuous improvement across the architecture practice and the broader engineering organization.
• Demonstrate sound judgment in balancing business priorities, operational risks, organizational readiness, and technology strategy.

Experience And Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, software architecture, or enterprise architecture, including significant experience leading architecture for distributed, high-scale platforms.
• 10+ years of people leadership experience managing senior architects, principal engineers, or comparable senior technical individual contributors.
• Experience partnering with Product Management and Engineering leadership to define architecture strategy, roadmaps, and execution plans for complex product portfolios.
• Strong knowledge of modern cloud-native architecture, including microservices, Kubernetes, APIs, event-driven systems, resiliency patterns, observability, and security-by-design.
• Demonstrated ability to lead architectural direction for complex data-intensive and transaction-oriented systems with high requirements for performance, availability, and scale.
• Experience establishing architecture governance, decision frameworks, standards, and review processes that improve consistency and delivery quality across multiple teams.
• Strong understanding of security, privacy, identity, integration, and data architecture patterns relevant to large-scale enterprise and product environments.
• Proven ability to evaluate tradeoffs across build/buy/customize/deprecate strategies and to communicate technical decisions effectively to executive, product, and engineering audiences.
• Excellent leadership, communication, conflict resolution, and organizational influencing skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in AdTech, MarTech, media technology, or adjacent digital advertising ecosystems, including familiarity with ad serving, programmatic supply and demand, identity, measurement, or monetization workflows.
• Experience with premium video, CTV, SSAI, live event monetization, or marketplace platforms is strongly preferred.
• Experience supporting global product organizations with multiple engineering teams and complex stakeholder environments.
• Hands-on familiarity with architecture patterns for generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), workflow orchestration, agentic AI, and governance for production AI systems.
• Experience driving modernization of legacy systems into more modular, platform-oriented, API-first, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with FinOps, cost-aware architecture, and engineering practices that improve operational efficiency and cloud spend discipline.