Enterprise Architect and Lead

Job Title: Enterprise Architect and Lead

Position Type: Fulltime with Prime Vendor

Location: Chicago, IL

End Client: United Airlines

Overview

We are looking for an experienced Enterprise Architect and Lead to provide architectural leadership and technical guidance across projects in the Travel & Hospitality domain. This role will oversee engineering teams, drive solution design, and act as the go-to person for architectural/solution decisions and best practices.

Key Responsibilities

• Define enterprise architecture strategy and roadmaps.
• Lead architecture governance and review boards.
• Translate business needs into scalable technology solutions.
• Provide end-to-end solution architecture oversight.
• Define cloud, integration, and data architecture strategies.
• Support RFPs and technical evaluations.
• Manage client stakeholders and provide technical leadership.
• Mentor, lead, and guide teams and ensure adherence to architecture standards and best practices.
• Drive thought leadership and promote the adoption of emerging technologies.
• Lead AI/GenAI POCs and innovation initiatives, including identification and leading development of relevant use cases in collaboration with the other teams.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with business, product, and engineering teams to ensure alignment.

Required Skills

• Strong expertise in AWS cloud, including architecting, designing, developing, and managing scalable, resilient, and secure AWS services. Hands-on experience with AWS compute, storage, databases, networking, and security, etc.
• Proficient in AWS DevOps, SRE practices, including CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, containerization and orchestration, monitoring, and observability.
• Experience in cloud cost optimization best practices to support enterprise-grade cloud solutions.
• Experience designing and implementing microservices-based architectures, with a strong focus on API-first design principles and building event-driven systems using messaging and streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka, MQ, Solace) to enable scalable, loosely coupled, and resilient applications.
• Knowledge of enterprise architecture frameworks (e.g., TOGAF)
• Experience in cloud migration and modernization.
• Understanding of the Aviation domain, including:
• NOC (Network Operations Control), FLIFO,
• Baggage systems
• Reservation, GDS integration, etc.
• Strong stakeholder management and leadership skills
• Experience in secure coding practices and application security.
• Experience with programming languages such as Java, .NET, or Python.
• Cloud Architect certification
• TOGAF certification
• Experience with Solace
• Experience across broader hospitality domains outside of airlines (Airports, hotels, cruise, restaurants, etc.)
• Experience with Azure and Google Cloud Platform cloud.

Education

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field