Senior Esri Enterprise Systems Architect ​/ Administrator

Overview

Kimley-Horn, one of Fortune Magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work For," is looking for a Senior Esri Enterprise Systems Architect/Administrator to join the team in our Cary, North Carolina (NC) office. While the preferred location for this role is Cary, NC, qualified candidates in other Kimley-Horn office locations may be considered. Compensation is location dependent. Salary ranges for other locations may vary based on geographic market, experience, qualifications, and other job-related factors.

This is an in-office position.

This role is responsible for the architecture, lifecycle, and long-term health of our ArcGIS Enterprise environment. A large server deployment supporting ArcGIS Enterprise, ArcGIS Online, and ArcGIS Pro across a 10,000+ person organization. The ideal candidate has deep hands-on Enterprise administration experience, has led major infrastructure changes before, and wants to shape platform strategy — including the responsible integration of agentic AI into geospatial workflows — while mentoring the broader Geospatial Platform Services team.

• Own the architecture and long-term technical roadmap for the organization's ArcGIS Enterprise environment, including planning and leading infrastructure migrations across the large server deployment
• 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
• Own 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 team on backup/DR strategy (WebGISDR, Backup My Org , custom scripting), and validate recovery processes through the infrastructure transition
• Coordinate with third-party patching/security vendors to ensure OS-level patching and application-specific configuration don't fall through coverage gaps
• Partner with team members in database tuning, Admin API scripting, and migration execution
• Develop and maintain runbooks, standards, and documentation so platform knowledge isn't concentrated in any single person
• Evaluate monitoring tooling and metrics (ArcGIS Monitor and infrastructure-level monitoring) to ensure accuracy through the infrastructure transition 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 the most complex production issues, migration blockers, or ambiguous data problems

• 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 in datasets
• Define guardrails and human-in-the-loop checkpoints for any agentic workflows that can modify, archive, or delete geospatial data, ensuring agents operate within documented data governance standards
• Assess data readiness and structure (schema quality, metadata completeness, geometry validity) needed for geospatial data to be reliably consumed by AI agents or used in retrieval-augmented workflows
• Develop or oversee scripts/integrations that allow agentic tools to safely query platform health, usage, and content metadata via the ArcGIS Admin API, without granting agents unchecked write access to production systems
• Stay current on emerging agentic AI capabilities in the Esri ecosystem and broader geospatial industry, and recommend where they can responsibly reduce manual toil (e.g., content inventory reporting, patch verification, log triage) versus where human judgment must remain primary
• Partner with security and IT governance stakeholders to ensure any AI agent access to geospatial data…