Director, Enterprise Architecture – Platform & Infrastructure Reston - Hybrid FreeWheel

Job Summary

Director, Enterprise Architecture – Platform & Infrastructure is the leader responsible for building and leading the Platform Architecture team. This leader defines the long-range architecture strategy, standards, roadmaps, and governance for Free Wheel’s infrastructure and shared platform capabilities, including cloud and datacenter infrastructure, Kubernetes and container platforms, compute, storage, networking, databases, observability, CI/CD, developer tooling, secrets management, identity integration, service connectivity, and related platform technologies.

• Lead, develop, and manage a team of Enterprise Architects responsible for platform, infrastructure, and shared engineering capability architecture across Free Wheel.
• Define and drive the Platform & Infrastructure Architecture vision, operating model, engagement approach, standards, governance mechanisms, and strategic roadmaps.
• Serve as a strategic architecture advisor to the Executive Director of Enterprise Architecture, helping set priorities, shape the EA agenda, and mature the architecture practice across the organization.
• Serve as the primary Enterprise Architecture partner to Platform Engineering leadership, providing strategic direction while enabling Platform Engineering to own delivery, operations, and execution of platform capabilities.
• Establish architectural direction for cloud and datacenter platforms, compute, Kubernetes and container orchestration, managed control planes, serverless platforms, storage, databases, networking, observability, CI/CD, developer experience, secrets management, identity integration, and internal platform services.
• Shape Free Wheel’s multi‑cloud and hybrid infrastructure strategy, including architectural guardrails for workload placement, portability, resiliency, operational readiness, cost efficiency, security, and regulatory or business constraints.
• Develop and maintain reference architectures, platform standards, target‑state designs, architecture decision records, technology lifecycle recommendations, and modernization roadmaps.
• Drive platform modernization and rationalization efforts that reduce legacy complexity, technology fragmentation, operational toil, duplicated capabilities, and unnecessary variance across engineering teams.
• Define paved roads and golden paths that improve developer productivity while balancing platform consistency, flexibility, reliability, security, and business delivery needs.
• Guide architectural direction for observability, logging, tracing, metrics, alerting, service health, SLO practices, reliability engineering, incident learning, and operational excellence.
• Partner with Security and Operations to ensure platform strategies incorporate secure‑by‑design principles, secrets management, identity, vulnerability management, policy enforcement, auditability, and production readiness.
• Partner with Finance, Engineering, and Platform Engineering to embed Fin Ops and cost‑aware architecture practices into cloud and platform strategy, including cost transparency, usage efficiency, and informed tradeoff analysis.
• Influence build, buy, extend, standardize, deprecate, and retire decisions by evaluating and communicating tradeoffs across business value, strategic optionality, architectural fit, resiliency, security, operability, risk, and total cost of ownership.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, including AI‑enabled developer platforms, automation, infrastructure orchestration, and platform engineering tooling, and define pragmatic adoption strategies when they create measurable engineering leverage.
• Partner closely with Product Architecture so that product‑aligned architectures are grounded in shared platform capabilities, standardized integration patterns, reusable infrastructure services, and clear technology guardrails.
• Coach and mentor architects and principal engineers; foster a high‑performing architecture community of‑practice that raises technical rigor and improves decision quality across Engineering.
• Consistent exercise of independent judgment and discretion in matters of significance.
• Other duties and responsibilities as assigned.