Principal IT Architect; Operational Technology

Xcel Energy (NASDAQ: XEL) is a leading energy provider and Fortune 500 company, dedicated to serving millions of electricity and natural gas customers across eight states:
Minnesota, Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico and Texas. We make energy work better for our customers, helping them thrive every day. That means always raising the bar - delivering better service and providing more reliable, resilient, and sustainable energy.

Xcel Energy is a place where you’ll have opportunities to grow, expand your skills, and help lead the clean energy transition. We offer meaningful rewards, recognition, and support to help you build your career and make an impact - both on the job and beyond. Most importantly, it means you’ll be joining a company that knows employees are the driving force behind its success and is committed to helping you be your best.

Xcel Energy supports a hybrid work model to enable collaboration and flexibility. Many roles are expected to work onsite three days per week (Tuesday–Thursday); however, work location expectations vary based on role, team, and business needs.

The Principal IT Architect for Operational Technology serves as a strategic technical and architectural authority for mission-critical operational technology platforms and environments. The role provides architectural leadership, operational insight, and cross-functional coordination across complex technology ecosystems where reliability, security, compliance, and business continuity are essential.

This role acts as a bridge between architecture, operations, cybersecurity, infrastructure, identity, network, vendor, and business teams, ensuring operational systems are designed, integrated, modernized, and supported in a manner that enables safe, reliable, and sustainable business operations.

The Principal Architect is expected to think beyond individual project delivery by developing platform roadmaps, reusable capabilities, architecture standards, and long-term technology strategies that reduce complexity, manage risk, and improve operational outcomes across the enterprise.

• Provide Domain architectural leadership and technical expertise for mission-critical technology platforms operating in highly available, regulated, and operationally critical environments.

• Develop, communicate, and operationalize technology strategies that support reliable business operations while enabling modernization, cybersecurity, compliance, and long-term sustainability objectives.

• Create and maintain technology roadmaps that guide capability evolution, platform modernization, technical debt reduction, technology standardization, and operational sustainability.

• Lead and influence architecture and design discussions for complex technology initiatives spanning multiple platforms, domains, business functions, and stakeholder groups.

• Review and influence solution architectures to ensure alignment with enterprise strategy, architecture principles, technology roadmaps, cybersecurity requirements, and operational needs.

• Drive architecture governance processes that improve design quality, consistency, and long-term technology sustainability.

• Provide architectural leadership for integrations across operational platforms, enterprise applications, data platforms, cloud services, and external partners.

• Guide architecture decisions involving real-time and near real-time data exchange, event-driven architectures, telemetry, workflow automation, and complex system integrations.

• Define and promote integration patterns, architecture standards, and best practices that improve interoperability and reduce complexity across technology ecosystems.

• Guide architecture decisions involving identity management, access controls, trust boundaries, infrastructure security, network architecture, cybersecurity requirements, and secure operational access patterns.

• Identify and address architectural risks that may impact system reliability, cybersecurity posture, compliance obligations, operational effectiveness, or business continuity.

• Advocate for security-by-design principles and ensure appropriate risk management practices are incorporated throughout the solution lifecycle.

• Advocate for operational readiness, observability, supportability, and resiliency throughout the technology lifecycle.

• Ensure monitoring, alerting, logging, recovery, performance, and support requirements are…