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…