Program Architect ADMS

Job Description

Program Architect
Role Summary

The Program Architect is responsible for architectural leadership and coordination across large, complex enterprise programs spanning multiple projects, systems, and delivery teams. This role bridges enterprise architectural strategy and program execution, ensuring architectural cohesion, disciplined governance, and successful delivery at scale.

The Program Architect operates as the architectural owner for a program, orchestrating solution-level architects across organizational boundaries while enabling Enterprise Architects to focus on enterprise-wide strategy and standards. This role ensures architectural decisions are aligned, intentional, and executable-without becoming a bottleneck to delivery.

Key Responsibilities
Program-Level Architecture Ownership

• Own the end-to-end architecture for an assigned program, including target state, transition states, and integration strategy
• Ensure architectural consistency across all projects and workstreams
• Act as the escalation point for cross-solution conflicts, tradeoffs, and risks

Enterprise Alignment & Governance

• Partner with Enterprise Architects to translate strategy, principles, and standards into program-level direction
• Ensure compliance with enterprise architecture, security, reliability, and regulatory requirements
• Lead architecture reviews and manage governance artifacts and approvals

Architect Team Leadership & Coordination

• Lead and coordinate a blended team of architects across multiple organizational units
• Provide direction, guardrails, and decision clarity without micromanaging
• Facilitate collaboration to prevent fragmentation and duplication

Integration & Dependency Management

• Own cross-system integration strategy (interfaces, data flows, shared services)
• Identify and manage dependencies across projects, platforms, and external programs
• Proactively mitigate architectural risks impacting delivery or outcomes

Program Leadership Partnership

• Serve as a trusted technical partner to program leadership
• Align architecture decisions with business objectives, timelines, and outcomes
• Communicate risks, tradeoffs, and status in a clear, decision-oriented manner

Delivery & Execution Support

• Stay engaged throughout delivery, not just design phases
• Support teams during implementation to resolve architectural issues
• Ensure solutions are operable, supportable, and production-ready

Operational Readiness & Lifecycle Ownership

• Ensure designs address scalability, reliability, security, and observability
• Support production readiness and deployment planning
• Capture lessons learned and contribute to enterprise standards

Required Qualifications
Experience

• 8-10+ years in architecture, engineering, or senior technical leadership
• Experience leading architecture for large-scale, multi-project enterprise programs
• Prior Solution Architect or Lead Architect experience with delivery accountability

Technical Breadth

• Strong understanding of:
  • Distributed and integrated systems
  • Application and data architecture
  • Cloud and/or hybrid environments
  • Security and non-functional design considerations
• Ability to work across application, platform, infrastructure, and operations domains

Leadership & Influence

• Proven ability to lead without direct authority
• Comfortable making and defending decisions in ambiguous environments
• Ability to challenge stakeholders and vendors constructively

Communication & Stakeholder Management

• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to communicate effectively with both executives and technical teams
• Focus on pragmatic, decision-oriented documentation

Program Overview

This program focuses on the implementation and integration of a modern, real-time operational platform that unifies multiple core operational systems into a cohesive ecosystem. The initiative spans system integration, real-time data processing, operational analytics, and platform modernization.

Key areas include integration across enterprise and operational systems, real-time data ingestion, control and monitoring capabilities, and advanced analytics to support reliability, efficiency, and scalability.

This program is a cornerstone initiative in modernizing operational capabilities, improving system visibility, reducing downtime, and supporting future scalability and automation.

Program Architect Focus

• Define end-to-end program architecture across core platform components and integrations
• Ensure seamless integration with upstream and downstream enterprise systems
• Establish architectural guardrails for vendor platforms and system integrators
• Design for high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery
• Lead data architecture strategy for real-time and near-real-time systems
• Ensure consistent data models and system-of-record alignment
• Drive integration alignment across operational, field, and enterprise systems
• Support scalability for increasing system complexity and automation
• Advise on long-term architecture strategy, including phased rollouts and legacy transitions
• Ensure cybersecurity is embedded across all architectural layers, especially across system boundaries