Enterprise Architect, Principal

Who are we looking for?

Choice Hotels, one of the world’s largest lodging franchisors, is seeking a Principal Enterprise Architect to join our Enterprise Architecture team. The team connects business strategy with technology execution by defining architecture direction, standards, roadmaps, and guardrails for enterprise platforms, business capabilities, cloud services, data platforms, integrations, and AI‑enabled solutions. As a key member, you will shape enterprise technology strategy, guide modernization, and help Choice adopt scalable, secure, resilient, and future‑ready technology capabilities.

Applicants must be able to translate business priorities into architecture direction, influence stakeholders, and guide modern platforms, cloud‑native solutions, and AI‑enabled capabilities. This role is not eligible for sponsorship and requires a four‑day onsite hybrid schedule at our N. Scottsdale office.

• Own enterprise architecture strategy across platforms, business capabilities, and technology domains, ensuring alignment with business priorities, modernization objectives, and long‑term technology strategy.
• Define and govern architecture standards, reference architectures, integration patterns, API strategies, cloud service patterns, and enterprise solution guardrails.
• Lead architecture strategy and adoption planning for cloud modernization, platform engineering, developer enablement, data‑driven decision making, generative AI, intelligent agents, and automation capabilities.
• Partner with Business Relationship Management, Product, Technology, Security, Privacy, Risk, Data, Engineering, and operational stakeholders to align technology investments with business objectives and governance requirements.
• Establish architecture patterns and guardrails for AI‑enabled systems, enterprise AI platforms, intelligent automation, orchestration capabilities, and emerging AI technologies.
• Assess current‑state and future‑state architectures, identify practical transition states, and define short‑ and long‑term roadmaps for modernization, platform growth, AI adoption, and enterprise capability maturity.
• Drive proof‑of‑concepts, architectural prototypes, technology assessments, and tradeoff analysis to validate future‑state capabilities and inform enterprise investment decisions.
• Serve as a trusted advisor and technical leader for strategic initiatives, architecture reviews, solution direction, stakeholder decision‑making, and Enterprise Architecture practice maturity.

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, engineering, or a related field required; equivalent experience may be considered. Master’s degree preferred.
• At least 10 years of relevant experience in software development, information systems, enterprise architecture, solution architecture, or a related technical environment.
• Experience designing and implementing enterprise‑class systems, including distributed systems, cloud platforms, API‑based architectures, messaging patterns, application boundaries, and non‑functional requirements such as scalability, availability, security, resilience, observability, and supportability.
• Experience defining architecture strategy, standards, roadmaps, governance frameworks, and reference architectures across cloud, data, integration, application, platform engineering, modernization, and AI domains.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure; familiarity with enterprise AI platforms such as AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure AI, Google AI, or similar technologies preferred.
• Strong knowledge of architecture modeling, alternative analysis, tradeoff analysis, portfolio analysis, Agile/Scrum delivery, security and compliance considerations, and modern software delivery practices.
• Technical depth across service APIs, OpenAPI/Swagger, messaging technologies such as Kafka or Java Message Service, relational and non‑relational databases, CI/CD pipelines, version control, performance tuning, and cloud deployment patterns.
• Demonstrates strategic thinking, executive communication, collaboration, influence…