Executive Director, Platform Architecture

What You’ll Do

The Executive Director, Platform Architecture leads OCC's Platform Architecture team, owning the technical strategy and standards for all infrastructure domains — cloud, on-premises, networking, compute, storage, and observability. This is a people‑leadership role responsible for developing a team of principal architects and ensuring their work produces coherent, enterprise‑wide platform standards rather than isolated domain expertise.

The Executive Director, Platform Architecture translates OCC's resilience objectives and regulatory obligations into actionable platform architecture strategy, drives adoption of that strategy across Engineering and Operations, and ensures the platform layer keeps pace with OCC's technology transformation — including the Renaissance/Ovation program and ongoing cloud adoption.

• Lead, develop, and set direction for a team of principal architects covering cloud, on‑premises infrastructure, networking, compute, storage, and observability domains
• Own the Platform Architecture vision: deliver the resilient, scalable foundation upon which critical market functions depend — making resilience the default, not the exception
• Ensure individual architect domain expertise is synthesized into coherent, enterprise-wide platform standards — not siloed recommendations
• Manage team priorities, capacity, and delivery against architecture commitments across programs and initiatives; develop team members through coaching, feedback, and exposure to enterprise-scale architectural challenges

• Establish and maintain authoritative platform architecture standards spanning cloud (AWS), on-premises data center, hybrid connectivity, networking, compute, storage, and container platforms
• Define reference architectures and infrastructure patterns that Engineering and application teams can consume without requiring per‑project architecture engagement
• Own non‑functional requirements standards at the platform level — availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, latency, throughput, and capacity — as first‑class concerns applicable across all tiers of OCC's system portfolio
• Enforce platform standards through Architecture Review Board participation and design review processes
• Maintain infrastructure architecture documentation, ADRs, and transition plans that accurately reflect current and target state

• Own OCC's infrastructure architecture strategy for cloud adoption — defining what moves to AWS, what remains on-premises, and how hybrid connectivity is structured
• Ensure cloud architecture patterns for networking, security, identity, and compute are consistent, compliant, and operationally sound across all workloads
• Drive Git Ops and infrastructure-as-code adoption — pipeline standards, environment promotion, configuration management, and secrets management at enterprise scale
• Lead architecture direction for container platform (Kubernetes/EKS), streaming infrastructure (Kafka), and stream processing (Flink) as foundational platform capabilities
• Identify and systematically reduce infrastructure risk — single points of failure, end-of-life dependencies, capacity constraints, and gaps in recovery capabilities

• Serve as the primary platform architecture partner to Application Architecture, ensuring application designs are grounded in platform reality and platform capabilities evolve to meet application needs
• Collaborate with Engineering, Security, and Operations to ensure platform architecture decisions are implementable, operable, and aligned to security requirements
• Engage with Technology Leads, program management, and senior leadership to represent platform architecture in strategic planning, budgeting, and vendor decisions
• Coordinate with Governance/Risk and Compliance to ensure platform architecture satisfies OCC's regulatory obligations under Regulation SCI and CPMI-IOSCO resilience principles

• Establish observability standards — metrics, logging, distributed tracing, and…