Enterprise Architect - Product, Cloud, Agentic

Job Description

The Principal Enterprise Architect is the senior individual-contributor authority on enterprise architecture. This is a hands-on, building role rather than a people‑leadership or review role: influence is earned through technical depth, working artifacts, and the ability to turn complex, cross-functional designs into coherent architecture teams can actually build on. Two emerging areas receive particular emphasis: cloud architecture on AWS, and the architecture enabling the client move toward agent-based, autonomous software development.

These are one connected strategy, and this role is central to building and keeping it coherent.

Enterprise Architecture Authority:
Serve as the enterprise-wide architectural authority across the client’s technology estate.

Custom Digital Product Architecture:
Own the architecture for the client’s portfolio of custom-built digital products — internal and external customer-facing applications, and the platforms behind payroll, driver, operations, routing, and scheduling.

Shared Digital Services & Integration Architecture:
Design and stand up client"s “Shared Digital Services” and enterprise integration layer — delivering the connective fabric as reusable, self-service capabilities teams adopt rather than request, so that custom products share data and backend functions cleanly and consistently across the landscape.

Cloud Architecture (AWS):
Own and build the cloud paved road on AWS — reference implementations, landing zones, and golden paths teams ship on, not standards documents they are audited against. Build a dynamic cloud environment defined by automated, rule‑based, and progressively‑provisioned access, designed so that autonomous agents operate independently and safely within it.

Agentic & Autonomous Software Development:
Design, prototype, and harden the guardrail layer for First Student’s emerging agent‑based software development lifecycle — agent runtime patterns, control-plane scaffolds, and the eval, supervision, and observability substrate that keeps autonomous systems in bounds. Make the safe path the fast path, so teams have no incentive to route around it. Do this as a key contributor inside the group design process, not as a downstream approver.

Security & Compliance by Design:
Partner closely with the Senior Director of Cybersecurity and their team — who own risk assessment — to encode security, privacy, and regulatory requirements into the paved road as policy‑as‑code and safe defaults, so obligations attached to student and driver data, including FERPA and applicable privacy laws, are inherited by construction rather than enforced by review — particularly as autonomous agents and dynamic access provisioning expand the surface that must remain compliant.

Architecture Governance & Standards:
Encode architecture principles and patterns into reusable scaffolds, golden paths, and automated checks that make the right way the easy way. Reserve formal review and sign‑off for genuinely irreversible (Type
1) decisions; let reversible work run on guardrails, not gates. Drive adoption by making the standard path the lowest‑friction path.

Cross‑Functional Collaboration & Strategic Alignment:
Collaborate with senior leadership, VPs, engineering managers, and the cloud architect to translate business goals into architecture, surface dependencies early, and flag where team and system boundaries need to move together. Communicate the architectural direction clearly to both technical and executive audiences.

Emerging Technology Assessment:
Continuously evaluate emerging technologies and trends relevant to student transportation and to First Student’s cloud and agentic direction — including EV technology, IoT, cloud‑native patterns, and frontier AI. Pilot, prototype, and recommend where and how new capabilities should be adopted, while remaining deliberately agile as the underlying tooling evolves.

Operating‑Model & Team‑Topology Architecture:
Design team boundaries and interaction modes so the organization’s structure produces the loosely‑coupled, fast‑iterating architecture the strategy requires (inverse Conway).

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