Senior Esri Enterprise Systems Architect / Administrator

Kimley-Horn, one of Fortune Magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work For," is seeking a Senior Esri Enterprise Systems Architect/Administrator for our Virginia Beach, Virginia office. Qualified candidates in other Kimley-Horn office locations may also be considered. This is an in-office position with compensation dependent on location.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and long-term technical roadmap for the organization's ArcGIS Enterprise environment, including planning and leading infrastructure migrations across a large server deployment supporting ArcGIS Enterprise, ArcGIS Online, and ArcGIS Pro for a 10,000+ person organization.
• Design and implement a data lifecycle and archival strategy for Portal content, balancing storage growth against usage patterns and dependencies on active web maps and apps.
• Manage PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL server-based enterprise geodatabase performance at scale, including tuning, index strategy, and storage reclamation for high-volume, imagery-heavy databases.
• Establish data governance standards (geometry validation, attribute hygiene, versioning/replication hygiene) to prevent bad or oversized data from degrading platform performance or complicating migrations.
• Partner with the team on backup/DR strategy (WebGISDR, BackupMyOrg, custom scripting) and validate recovery processes through infrastructure transitions.
• Coordinate with third-party patching/security vendors to ensure OS-level patching and application-specific configuration coverage.
• Collaborate with team members on database tuning, Admin API scripting, and migration execution.
• Develop and maintain runbooks, standards, and documentation to distribute platform knowledge across the team.
• Evaluate monitoring tooling and metrics (ArcGIS Monitor and infrastructure-level monitoring) to ensure accuracy and correlate content-level growth with server-level health.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives across geospatial infrastructure, workflows, and team technical capability.
• Serve as the senior technical escalation point for complex production issues, migration blockers, or ambiguous data problems.

Agentic AI & Geospatial Data Responsibilities

• Evaluate and pilot agentic AI tools (e.g., Esri's AI assistants, custom agents built against the ArcGIS Admin/REST APIs, or LLM-based automation) for geospatial data governance tasks such as archive candidate identification, metadata tagging, and anomaly detection.
• Define guardrails and human-in-the-loop checkpoints for agentic workflows that modify, archive, or delete geospatial data, ensuring compliance with documented data governance standards.
• Assess data readiness and structure (schema quality, metadata completeness, geometry validity) required for reliable consumption by AI agents or retrieval-augmented workflows.
• Develop or oversee scripts/integrations allowing agentic tools to safely query platform health, usage, and content metadata via the ArcGIS Admin API without granting unchecked write access to production systems.
• Stay current on emerging agentic AI capabilities in the Esri ecosystem and broader geospatial industry, recommending responsible applications to reduce manual toil (e.g., content inventory reporting, patch verification, log triage).
• Partner with security and IT governance stakeholders to ensure AI agent access to geospatial data complies with organizational security and data privacy standards.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Geography, Geospatial Science, Computer Science, or a related field.
• Minimum of 8 years of experience in Esri ArcGIS Enterprise administration, including leading at least one full-lifecycle infrastructure migration end-to-end.
• Deep experience administering all ArcGIS Enterprise components (Server, Portal, Notebook Server, ArcGIS Monitor, Data Store) at a multi-server, enterprise scale.
• Strong PostgreSQL administration expertise, including vacuum internals, performance tuning, and troubleshooting at scale—sufficient to teach and review, not just execute.
• Experience with ArcGIS Enterprise backup methodologies (WebGISDR, BackupMyOrg, custom scripting) and disaster recovery validation.
• Experience with Microsoft Azure cloud environments, including planning/executing infrastructure migrations.
• Experience with SQL Server and enterprise geodatabase management (versioning, replication, archiving-enabled feature classes).
• Demonstrated experience mentoring or training other geospatial administrators.
• Strong scripting ability (Python/ArcPy) for automation, reporting, and governance enforcement via the ArcGIS Admin API.
• Foundational understanding of how agentic AI/LLM-based tools interact with structured and spatial data, and the risks of granting them system or data access.
• Excellent problem-solving skills with the ability to diagnose issues at the architecture level, not just the symptom level.

Desired Skills

• Esri certification (Enterprise Administration Professional, Enterprise System Design Professional, or Enterprise Geodata Management Professional).
• Experience building data governance or archiving programs from scratch in a geospatial or enterprise data context.
• Familiarity with monitoring platforms beyond ArcGIS Monitor (Datadog, Splunk, Nagios, or similar).

Pay

$125,000 to $145,000

Benefits

• Exceptional Retirement Plan: 2-to-1 company match on up to 4% of eligible compensation (salary + bonus) and additional profit-sharing contribution.
• Comprehensive Health Coverage: Low-cost medical, dental, and vision insurance options.
• Time Off: Personal leave, flexible scheduling, floating holidays, and half-day Fridays.
• Financial Wellness: Student loan matching in our 401(k) and performance-based bonuses.
• Professional Development: Tuition reimbursement and extensive internal training programs.
• Family-Friendly Benefits: New Parent Leave, family building benefits, and childcare resources.