Principal Enterprise Architect

First Student is a leading provider of student transportation solutions, dedicated to ensuring safe and efficient transportation for students. Our commitment to innovation has led us to pioneer electric school buses and to build and continuously refine a substantial portfolio of custom digital products on AWS - spanning the customer-facing experiences families and school districts rely on and the internal platforms that run our operations.

As we modernize the industry - increasingly through cloud-native architecture and the responsible adoption of autonomous, agent-based systems - we are seeking a Principal Enterprise Architect to build and keep coherent the technical foundation of that transformation.

The Principal Enterprise Architect is the senior individual-contributor authority on enterprise architecture at First Student. 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. The role carries an enterprise‑wide remit and concentrates on the problems of greatest consequence to the business.

Serve as the enterprise‑wide architectural authority across the First Student technology estate. Operate as a contributor within a collaborative design process involving senior leaders, engineering managers, and the cloud architect, and act as the individual who synthesizes competing inputs into a coherent target architecture and builds the connective scaffolding that makes it real. Concentrate effort on the problems of greatest enterprise consequence.

Own the architecture for First Student's portfolio of custom-built digital products – the parent app, school‑district and customer-facing applications, and the platforms behind payroll, driver, operations, routing, and scheduling. Lead the biggest architectural problems, design challenges, and integrations across these products, and build the shared scaffolds and reference implementations that let product teams ship against a coherent whole rather than reinvent it.

Design and stand up First Student'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.

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. Product implementation and cloud spend are owned by delivery teams; the paved road they build on is owned and built here.

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.

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.

Encode architecture principles and…