Director, Enterprise Architecture – Platform & Infrastructure - (Reston - Hybrid) FreeWheel

Core Responsibilities 

• Lead, develop, and manage a team of Enterprise Architects responsible for platform, infrastructure, and shared engineering capability architecture across FreeWheel. 

• Define and drive the Platform & Infrastructure Architecture vision, operating model, engagement approach, standards, governance mechanisms, and strategic roadmaps. 

• Serve as a strategic architecture advisor to the Executive Director of Enterprise Architecture, helping set priorities, shape the EA agenda, and mature the architecture practice across the organization. 

• Serve as the primary Enterprise Architecture partner to Platform Engineering leadership, providing strategic direction while enabling Platform Engineering to own delivery, operations, and execution of platform capabilities. 

• Establish architectural direction for cloud and datacenter platforms, compute, Kubernetes and container orchestration, managed control planes, serverless platforms, storage, databases, networking, observability, CI/CD, developer experience, secrets management, identity integration, and internal platform services. 

• Shape FreeWheel’s multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructure strategy, including architectural guardrails for workload placement, portability where appropriate, resiliency, operational readiness, cost efficiency, security, and regulatory or business constraints. 

• Develop and maintain reference architectures, platform standards, target-state designs, architecture decision records, technology lifecycle recommendations, and modernization roadmaps. 

• Drive platform modernization and rationalization efforts that reduce legacy complexity, technology fragmentation, operational toil, duplicated capabilities, and unnecessary variance across engineering teams. 

• Define paved roads and golden paths that improve developer productivity while balancing platform consistency, flexibility, reliability, security, and business delivery needs. 

• Guide architectural direction for observability, logging, tracing, metrics, alerting, service health, SLO practices, reliability engineering, incident learning, and operational excellence. 

• Partner with Security and Operations to ensure platform strategies incorporate secure-by-design principles, secrets management, identity, vulnerability management, policy enforcement, auditability, and production readiness. 

• Partner with Finance, Engineering, and Platform Engineering to embed FinOps and cost-aware architecture practices into cloud and platform strategy, including cost transparency, usage efficiency, and informed tradeoff analysis. 

• Influence build, buy, extend, standardize, deprecate, and retire decisions by evaluating and communicating tradeoffs across business value, strategic optionality, architectural fit, resiliency, security, operability, risk, and total cost of ownership. 

• Evaluate emerging technologies, including AI-enabled developer platforms, automation, infrastructure orchestration, and platform engineering tooling, and define pragmatic adoption strategies when they create measurable engineering leverage. 

• Partner closely with Product Architecture so that product-aligned architectures are grounded in shared platform capabilities, standardized integration patterns, reusable infrastructure services, and clear technology guardrails. 

• Coach and mentor architects and principal engineers; foster a high-performing architecture community-of-practice that raises technical rigor and improves decision quality across Engineering. 

• Consistent exercise of independent judgment and discretion in matters of significance. 

• Regular, consistent, and punctual attendance. 

• Other duties and responsibilities as assigned. 
   

Leadership Expectations 

• Operate as a people leader first and an architecture leader always: Build an engaged, high-performing Platform Architecture team with clear priorities, accountability, development plans, and strong technical credibility. 

• Act as a trusted advisor to the Executive Director of Enterprise Architecture, the CTO, and other Engineering SLT members by identifying platform risks, modernization opportunities, organizational friction, and priority decisions requiring executive alignment. 

• Architecture partner to Platform Engineering: Provide clear strategic direction, standards, and target-state guidance while maintaining a healthy distinction between architecture leadership and engineering delivery ownership. 

• Drive decisions to closure: Facilitate healthy technical debate, make tradeoffs explicit, document decisions, and ensure architecture guidance is actionable and socialized. 

• Lead with pragmatism: Balance long-term modernization, operational risk reduction, and near-term business delivery commitments. 

• Raise the level of executive communication: Translate complex platform, infrastructure, and technology tradeoffs into clear business, risk, cost, and delivery implications for senior stakeholders. 

• Foster a culture of inclusion, learning, and continuous improvement across the architecture practice and the broader Engineering organization. 

• Build an inclusive technical culture: Model collaboration, learning, transparency, and respect across Architecture, Engineering, Platform, Operations, Product, Security, and Data teams. 
   

Experience and Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field; advanced degree or equivalent practical experience preferred. 

• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, cloud architecture, enterprise architecture, or related technology leadership roles. 

• 5+ years of people leadership experience managing architects, principal engineers, platform architects, infrastructure architects, or comparable senior technical contributors. 

• Demonstrated experience defining architecture strategy and roadmaps for large-scale distributed systems, infrastructure platforms, cloud environments, or high-volume digital technology platforms. 

• Deep knowledge of cloud-native architecture, Kubernetes, containers, serverless, infrastructure automation, networking, storage, databases, observability, CI/CD, developer platforms, and security-by-design practices. 

• Strong understanding of hybrid infrastructure, datacenter modernization, multi-cloud strategy, workload placement, resiliency architecture, operational readiness, and platform lifecycle management.  Prior experience leading migrations of large, complex workloads between hyperscalers. 

• Experience establishing architecture governance, standards, review processes, exception management, reference architectures, and technology decision frameworks across multiple teams or business domains. 

• Experience partnering with Platform Engineering, Infrastructure, Operations, Security, Data, Product Architecture, and senior Engineering leadership to align architecture strategy with execution realities. 

• Proven ability to evaluate architectural tradeoffs across reliability, scalability, performance, security, operability, cost, developer productivity, time-to-market, and organizational readiness. 

• Experience with FinOps, cost-aware architecture, cloud spend governance, capacity planning, or infrastructure efficiency programs. 

• Excellent executive communication, stakeholder management, conflict resolution, organizational influence, and talent development skills. 
   

Preferred Qualifications 

• Hands-on familiarity with technologies and practices such as Kubernetes managed control planes, service mesh, API gateways, secrets management, policy-as-code, infrastructure-as-code, observability platforms, automated delivery pipelines, and database platform strategy. 

• Experience in AdTech, MarTech, media technology, SaaS, marketplace platforms, digital advertising, or similarly high-scale, low-latency, distributed, data-intensive environments. 

• Experience supporting globally distributed engineering organizations and platforms with high availability, high throughput, and complex operational requirements. 

• Experience leading or influencing platform engineering transformation, developer experience improvements, internal developer platforms, service catalog adoption, or golden path strategies. 

• Experience modernizing legacy infrastructure and application platforms into more modular, cloud-native, automated, and operationally efficient environments. 

• Experience with AI-enabled engineering productivity, automation, platform intelligence, or architecture governance tooling. 
   

Success Measures 

• A trusted Platform Architecture team that is consistently engaged on the highest-value infrastructure, platform, modernization, and engineering effectiveness decisions. 

• Clear, actionable platform architecture roadmaps that align Enterprise Architecture, Platform Engineering, Security, Operations, Data, Product Architecture, and Engineering leadership. 

• Measurable improvements in platform cost efficiency, reliability, scalability, resiliency, operability, security posture, and developer productivity. 

• Increased adoption of standardized platforms, paved roads, golden paths, reference architectures, and reusable shared capabilities. 

• Reduced technology fragmentation, duplicated platform capabilities, infrastructure complexity, operational toil, and unmanaged technical debt. 

• Stronger architectural discipline around cloud and datacenter strategy, Kubernetes, observability, databases, CI/CD, secrets management, developer tooling, and internal platform services. 

• Improved quality and speed of technology decisions with aligned stakeholders – through effective governance, documented tradeoffs, clear standards, and pragmatic exception handling. 

• A strong partnership model between Platform Architecture and Product Architecture, enabling product teams to deliver business value on a consistent, scalable, secure, and cost-efficient foundation. 

• A high-performing architecture organization with strong talent development, credibility, collaboration, and influence across Engineering. 
   

Required Skills 

• Enterprise Architecture 

• Platform Architecture 

• Infrastructure Architecture 

• Cloud Strategy 

• Platform Engineering 

• Kubernetes 

• Cloud-Native Architecture 

• Observability 

• Developer Productivity 

• Engineering Standardization 

• FinOps 

• Technology Governance 

• Strategic Management 

• Stakeholder Management 

• Building High-Performance Teams 

• Business Leadership 
   

Employees at all levels are expected to 

• Understand our Operating Principles; make them the guidelines for how you do your job. 

• Own the customer experience - think and act in ways that put our customers first, give them seamless digital options at every touchpoint, and make them promoters of our products and services. 

• Know your stuff - be enthusiastic learners, users and advocates of our game-changing technology, products and services, especially our digital tools and experiences. 

• Win as a team - make big things happen by working together and being open to new ideas. 

• Be an active part of the Net Promoter System - a way of working that brings more employee and customer feedback into the company - by joining huddles, making call backs and helping us elevate opportunities to do better for our customers. 

• Drive results and growth. 

• Support a culture of inclusion in how you work and lead. 

• Do what's right for each other, our customers, investors and our communities.