Jobs via Dice
Principal Enterprise Architect || Chicago, IL or Houston, TX Hybrid
Jobs via Dice, Houston, Texas, United States, 77246
Principal Enterprise Architect – Chicago, IL or Houston, TX (Hybrid)
Job Title:
Principal Enterprise Architect
Location: Chicago, IL or Houston, TX (Hybrid – 2–3 days onsite per week)
Role Overview
The Principal Enterprise Architect will play a pivotal role in shaping the digital strategy for the organization, providing both strategic vision and tactical architecture direction. This role requires a highly skilled, seasoned technical leader with deep cloud and enterprise architecture expertise. The architect will influence cross‑functional teams, drive architectural governance, promote best practices, and ensure alignment with enterprise‑wide technology strategies.
This position also serves as a thought leader, challenging the status quo, driving adoption of modern technologies and cloud standards, and ensuring that solutions are scalable, secure, resilient, and aligned with business goals.
Key Responsibilities
Collaborate with domain architects, engineers, and leadership to develop technical standards, reference architectures, design patterns, decision frameworks, and opinion papers.
Develop and manage enterprise technical strategies, ensuring adoption of standard processes and practices.
Translate business strategy into technical strategy, defining end‑to‑end target architectures.
Manage the Architecture Review Board (ARB) process, creating validation checklists and reviewing architectural artifacts.
Provide guidance to Domain Architects and Solution Architects; review and sign off on architecture designs.
Drive improvements to architecture processes, methodologies, metrics, and governance frameworks.
Maintain and evolve Enterprise Architecture artifacts such as capability maps, reference architectures, and current‑state documentation.
Lead cloud adoption initiatives and evangelize cloud‑native best practices across the enterprise.
Promote proper cloud architecture principles for business solutions and drive modernization efforts.
Apply principles of scalability, reliability, security, maintainability, and performance to solution designs.
Address complex challenges related to transitioning from monolithic systems to microservices architectures.
Conduct R&D and proof‑of‑concepts for emerging technologies and platforms.
Recommend cost‑effective and functionally robust technologies.
Identify industry trends and incorporate relevant innovations into roadmaps and strategies.
Influence EA processes using emerging GenAI and Agentic AI trends; contribute to building accelerators for core frameworks.
Lead evaluation and selection of third‑party platforms, including SaaS solutions.
Ensure strong API management, microservices design, service mesh integration, and resiliency strategies.
Provide guidance on cloud workload migration, application performance optimization, and observability.
Support IAM initiatives, including authentication/authorization frameworks and open policy agent (OPA) tooling.
Partner across teams to gain alignment, drive change, and guide teams across organizational levels.
Deliver executive‑ready presentations and communicate architectural concepts to senior leaders, architects, engineers, and business stakeholders.
Required Qualifications
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or related field.
7+ years of proven experience, including 5+ years in Enterprise Architecture leadership roles.
Prior experience as a Principal Enterprise Architect, Chief Architect, or Head of Enterprise Architecture in a global organization.
Deep hands‑on experience designing, developing, and deploying enterprise‑scale software solutions.
Strong technical foundation across infrastructure, compute, networking, virtualization, and cloud technologies.
Expertise in cloud computing (AWS preferred) and workload migration challenges.
Strong background in API management, microservices, service mesh, API security, resiliency, observability, application performance management (Redis caching, etc.).
Experience guiding monolith‑to‑microservices transformations.
Knowledge of IAM solutions and policy engines like Open Policy Agent (OPA).
Strong technical documentation and writing skills.
Proven ability to influence, mentor, and drive consensus across teams.
Excellent communication skills with ability to present to all levels, including senior executives.
Preferred Qualifications
Master's degree in Computer Science or related field.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional (or Developer/SysOps equivalent).
Enterprise Architecture certifications such as TOGAF, Zachman, or Gartner.
3–5 years hands‑on Enterprise Architecture experience.
3–5 years of AWS cloud experience.
Experience in the airline or aviation domain.
Seniority Level Mid‑Senior level
Employment Type Full‑time
Job Function Information Technology
Industry Software Development
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Principal Enterprise Architect
Location: Chicago, IL or Houston, TX (Hybrid – 2–3 days onsite per week)
Role Overview
The Principal Enterprise Architect will play a pivotal role in shaping the digital strategy for the organization, providing both strategic vision and tactical architecture direction. This role requires a highly skilled, seasoned technical leader with deep cloud and enterprise architecture expertise. The architect will influence cross‑functional teams, drive architectural governance, promote best practices, and ensure alignment with enterprise‑wide technology strategies.
This position also serves as a thought leader, challenging the status quo, driving adoption of modern technologies and cloud standards, and ensuring that solutions are scalable, secure, resilient, and aligned with business goals.
Key Responsibilities
Collaborate with domain architects, engineers, and leadership to develop technical standards, reference architectures, design patterns, decision frameworks, and opinion papers.
Develop and manage enterprise technical strategies, ensuring adoption of standard processes and practices.
Translate business strategy into technical strategy, defining end‑to‑end target architectures.
Manage the Architecture Review Board (ARB) process, creating validation checklists and reviewing architectural artifacts.
Provide guidance to Domain Architects and Solution Architects; review and sign off on architecture designs.
Drive improvements to architecture processes, methodologies, metrics, and governance frameworks.
Maintain and evolve Enterprise Architecture artifacts such as capability maps, reference architectures, and current‑state documentation.
Lead cloud adoption initiatives and evangelize cloud‑native best practices across the enterprise.
Promote proper cloud architecture principles for business solutions and drive modernization efforts.
Apply principles of scalability, reliability, security, maintainability, and performance to solution designs.
Address complex challenges related to transitioning from monolithic systems to microservices architectures.
Conduct R&D and proof‑of‑concepts for emerging technologies and platforms.
Recommend cost‑effective and functionally robust technologies.
Identify industry trends and incorporate relevant innovations into roadmaps and strategies.
Influence EA processes using emerging GenAI and Agentic AI trends; contribute to building accelerators for core frameworks.
Lead evaluation and selection of third‑party platforms, including SaaS solutions.
Ensure strong API management, microservices design, service mesh integration, and resiliency strategies.
Provide guidance on cloud workload migration, application performance optimization, and observability.
Support IAM initiatives, including authentication/authorization frameworks and open policy agent (OPA) tooling.
Partner across teams to gain alignment, drive change, and guide teams across organizational levels.
Deliver executive‑ready presentations and communicate architectural concepts to senior leaders, architects, engineers, and business stakeholders.
Required Qualifications
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or related field.
7+ years of proven experience, including 5+ years in Enterprise Architecture leadership roles.
Prior experience as a Principal Enterprise Architect, Chief Architect, or Head of Enterprise Architecture in a global organization.
Deep hands‑on experience designing, developing, and deploying enterprise‑scale software solutions.
Strong technical foundation across infrastructure, compute, networking, virtualization, and cloud technologies.
Expertise in cloud computing (AWS preferred) and workload migration challenges.
Strong background in API management, microservices, service mesh, API security, resiliency, observability, application performance management (Redis caching, etc.).
Experience guiding monolith‑to‑microservices transformations.
Knowledge of IAM solutions and policy engines like Open Policy Agent (OPA).
Strong technical documentation and writing skills.
Proven ability to influence, mentor, and drive consensus across teams.
Excellent communication skills with ability to present to all levels, including senior executives.
Preferred Qualifications
Master's degree in Computer Science or related field.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional (or Developer/SysOps equivalent).
Enterprise Architecture certifications such as TOGAF, Zachman, or Gartner.
3–5 years hands‑on Enterprise Architecture experience.
3–5 years of AWS cloud experience.
Experience in the airline or aviation domain.
Seniority Level Mid‑Senior level
Employment Type Full‑time
Job Function Information Technology
Industry Software Development
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