Director, Platform Architecture

The Executive Director, Platform Architecture leads Platform Architecture team, owning the technical strategy and standards for all infrastructure domains cloud, on-premises, networking, compute, storage, and observability. This is a people leadership role responsible for developing a team of principal architects and ensuring their work produces coherent, enterprise-wide platform standards rather than isolated domain expertise.

The Executive Director, Platform Architecture translates resilience objectives and regulatory obligations into actionable platform architecture strategy, drives adoption of that strategy across Engineering and Operations, and ensures the platform layer keeps pace with technology transformation including the Renaissance/Ovation program and ongoing cloud adoption.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities:
To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each primary duty satisfactorily.
Lead the Platform Architecture Team
Lead, develop, and set direction for a team of principal architects covering cloud, on-premises infrastructure, networking, compute, storage, and observability domains
Own the Platform Architecture vision: deliver the resilient, scalable foundation upon which critical market functions depend making resilience the default, not the exception
Ensure individual architect domain expertise is synthesized into coherent, enterprise-wide platform standards not siloed recommendations
Manage team priorities, capacity, and delivery against architecture commitments across programs and initiatives Develop team members through coaching, feedback, and exposure to enterprise-scale architectural challenges

Define and Govern Platform Architecture Standards
Establish and maintain authoritative platform architecture standards spanning cloud (AWS), on-premises data center, hybrid connectivity, networking, compute, storage, and container platforms
Define reference architectures and infrastructure patterns that Engineering and application teams can consume without requiring per-project architecture engagement Own non-functional requirements standards at the platform level availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, latency, throughput, and capacity as first-class concerns applicable across all tiers of client's system portfolio
Enforce platform standards through Architecture Review Board participation and design review processes
Maintain infrastructure architecture documentation, ADRs, and transition plans that accurately reflect current and target state
Drive Infrastructure Modernization and Cloud Strategy
Own client's infrastructure architecture strategy for cloud adoption defining what moves to AWS, what remains on-premises, and how hybrid connectivity is structured
Ensure cloud architecture patterns for networking, security, identity, and compute are consistent, compliant, and operationally sound across all workloads Drive GitOps and infrastructure-as-code adoption pipeline standards, environment promotion, configuration management, and secrets management at enterprise scale
Lead architecture direction for container platform (Kubernetes/EKS), streaming infrastructure (Kafka), and stream processing (Flink) as foundational platform capabilities
Identify and systematically reduce infrastructure risk single points of failure, end-of-life dependencies, capacity constraints, and gaps in recovery capabilities

Partner Across the Organization
Serve as the primary platform architecture partner to Application Architecture, ensuring application designs are grounded in platform reality and platform capabilities evolve to meet application needs
Collaborate with Engineering, Security, and Operations to ensure platform architecture decisions are implementable, operable, and aligned to security requirements
Engage with Technology Leads, program management, and senior leadership to represent platform architecture in strategic planning, budgeting, and vendor decisions
Coordinate with Governance/Risk and Compliance to ensure platform architecture satisfies client's regulatory obligations under Regulation SCI and CPMI-IOSCO resilience principles

Ensure Operational Resilience
Establish observability standards metrics, logging, distributed tracing, and alerting as platform-level capabilities delivered to all application teams
Define and govern disaster recovery, business continuity, and resilience architecture across infrastructure domains
Drive capacity planning and performance engineering practices; ensure the platform is sized and architected ahead of demand, not reactive to it
Lead platform architecture participation in incident postmortems; ensure operational findings drive durable infrastructure improvements

Supervisory Responsibilities
Manages a team of principal architects and senior individual contributors across infrastructure architecture domains

Qualifications:
The requirements listed are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the primary functions.

Required
12+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or systems architecture, with at least 3 years in a people leadership or team lead role
Demonstrated experience defining and governing infrastructure architecture standards across multiple domains at organizational scale
Broad, hands-on knowledge across infrastructure domains:
cloud (AWS), on-premises data center, networking, compute, storage, and container platforms
Deep experience with AWS architecture VPCs, EC2, EKS, MSK, S3, IAM, KMS, Direct Connect, Transit Gateway, and security services
Strong working knowledge of Kubernetes cluster architecture, workload design, multi-tenancy, networking (CNI), and operational patterns at scale
Experience with Apache Kafka as enterprise streaming infrastructure deployment, operations, and topology design
Demonstrated experience leading GitOps and infrastructure-as-code programs Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, Flux, or equivalent
Experience with hybrid and on-premises/cloud connectivity architecture network design, routing,firewalling, and security zoning
Ability to lead through influence and authority building alignment across Engineering, Security, Operations, and Governance
Strong communication skills able to represent infrastructure strategy to executive leadership and translate architecture decisions into actionable standards for engineering teams

Preferred
Experience in financial services, particularly regulated environments (SIFMU, clearinghouse, exchange, or bank)
Familiarity with Regulation SCI, CPMI-IOSCO, or equivalent financial market infrastructure regulatory frameworks and their implications for infrastructure design
Experience with Apache Flink or equivalent stream processing frameworks in production environments
Experience with enterprise observability platforms OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or equivalent
Familiarity with low-latency and high-performance computing patterns relevant to risk and clearing workloads AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification or equivalent
Experience with enterprise architecture frameworks such as TOGAF

Technical Skills
Cloud: AWS foundational and advanced services EC2,
EKS, MSK, S3, VPC, IAM, KMS, Direct Connect, Transit Gateway, CloudWatch
Container platforms: Kubernetes (EKS or self-managed),
Docker, Helm, container networking (CNI)
Streaming and processing: Apache Kafka, Apache Flink
GitOps and IaC: Terraform, ArgoCD, Flux, Helm, GitHub Actions or Jenkins
Networking: routing protocols, firewalling, load balancing,
DNS, hybrid connectivity, network security zoning
Storage: block, object, and file storage architecture; backup and recovery patterns
Observability: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or equivalent
Unix/Linux environments; artifact management (Nexus, Artifactory)

Education and/or Experience
BS degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Mathematics, or a similar technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
12+ years of relevant work experience.

Certificates or Licenses
AWS Solutions Architect Associate or Professional (preferred)