Principal Enterprise Architect

Principal Enterprise Architect

The Principal Enterprise Architect is the senior-most technical architect in WME Enterprise IT and the principal technical advisor to infrastructure leadership on technology direction. The role owns the enterprise architecture — the standards, reference designs, and governance that define how WME's cloud, infrastructure, application, integration, and AI platforms fit together and evolve. It is the authority for "what good looks like" across the IT estate, and the seat that holds that line consistently as the rest of the function builds.

This is a deep-technical role without direct reports. Authority comes through enterprise architecture standards, architecture review and approval, design guidance, and influence across every engineering pillar — not through people management. The role sets the multi-year technology direction, governs the architecture estate against consistent standards, and ensures that day-to-day engineering decisions ladder up to a coherent enterprise architecture.

This role owns enterprise architecture authority and is fenced explicitly against the build-and-operate roles it governs:

• In scope: enterprise-wide architecture vision, standards, and reference designs across cloud, infrastructure, application, integration, data, and AI; architecture review and approval authority; the multi-year technology roadmap; legacy-modernization and integration / API governance; and the political and technical standing to enforce standards consistently across pillars.
• Relationship to the Senior Platform Engineer (#61): this role sets the enterprise cloud and platform standards; the Senior Platform Engineer builds and operates the platform estate within those standards and may flex deep onto product / engineering team projects. This role stays enterprise-wide and holds the standard so it does not lapse when platform engineering goes deep on a specific project;
  
  the two partner closely, with real-world platform learnings feeding back into the standards.
• Relationship to engineering and operations functions: the server & cloud infrastructure, network, and application & integration functions engineer and operate within the architecture and standards this role sets. This role governs and reviews; it does not run day-to-day operations.
• Partnership with cybersecurity governance: security and compliance requirements are designed into the architecture in partnership with the cybersecurity governance function; this role ensures architectural decisions align to those requirements.

Enterprise IT runs on one idea: operational excellence — technology that just works, problems fixed at the root, and an engineering bar that keeps climbing. As the senior-most architect, this role defines that bar for the whole estate. Six operating foundations describe how the function works, and a Principal here models all six and raises them across pillars.

• Service management, done right. Designs architecture with service reliability and operability built in, so what the function ships is dependable by design.
• Continual improvement. Treats architecture as living — uses real outcomes, metrics, and modernization signals to evolve the standards rather than freeze them.
• AI fluency. Sets the enterprise AI architecture standard and exemplifies AI-augmented engineering across the function.
• Ownership and documentation. Owns the architecture estate end to end and leaves reference architectures, standards, and decision records that scale beyond any one project.
• Security and risk by default. Builds security and risk into the architecture from the first decision, partnering with governance where decisions carry real weight.
• Clarity and influence. Earns alignment through clear standards, sound reasoning, and credibility — authority by influence, not by mandate.

Responsibilities group into seven pillars spanning the enterprise architecture mandate.

• Own the enterprise architecture vision and the standards and reference designs that span cloud, infrastructure, application, integration, data, and AI.
• Define "what good looks like" across the estate — opinionated, well-documented…