Senior Director, Enterprise Architecture - AdTech - FreeWheel (Chicago)

FreeWheel, a Comcast company, provides comprehensive ad platforms for publishers, advertisers, and media buyers. Powered by premium video content, robust data, and advanced technology, we’re making it easier for buyers and sellers to transact across all screens, data types, and sales channels. As a global company, we have offices in nine countries and can insert advertisements around the world.Job SummaryFreeWheel’s Enterprise Architecture team partners closely with Product Management and Engineering to translate business strategy, market opportunities, Product roadmaps, and technology constraints into scalable product architectures and Engineering roadmaps. The Senior Director, Enterprise Architecture is the senior leader responsible for building and leading a team of Enterprise Architects supporting FreeWheel’s product portfolio and providing technical direction to the Engineering organization.This role combines people leadership, portfolio-level architecture leadership, and organizational influence. The Sr Director will shape the architecture strategy for FreeWheel’s AdTech platforms, establish architecture governance and standards, guide investment decisions, and ensure product and engineering teams are aligned on pragmatic, scalable, secure, and cost-efficient technology choices. The leader in this role will also help modernize the architecture practice, elevate solution quality across the portfolio, and build strong partnerships with Product, Engineering, Operations, Security, Data, and client-facing stakeholders.Job DescriptionCore ResponsibilitiesLead, develop, and manage a team of Enterprise Architects who align to Product domains and partner closely with Engineering teams across FreeWheel’s AdTech platforms.Define and drive the Enterprise Architecture vision, operating model, and engagement approach for Product-facing EA, ensuring architecture work is tightly connected to business outcomes, product strategy, and delivery priorities.Serve as a strategic technology advisor to Product Management and Engineering leadership, translating market opportunities, portfolio priorities, and client requirements into actionable architecture direction and investment recommendations.Oversee creation of solution blueprints, reference architectures, architecture decision records (ADRs), roadmaps, and target-state designs that improve consistency, reuse, and execution quality across the portfolio.Establish and run effective architecture governance mechanisms, including design reviews, decision forums, standards management, exception handling, and architecture lifecycle oversight.Guide architectural direction for distributed, cloud-native systems spanning ad serving, SSP, DSP, audience/identity, measurement, revenue science, APIs, and data platforms.Ensure architectural strategies balance speed of delivery with long-term maintainability, operability, resiliency, privacy, security, interoperability, and cost efficiency.Partner with Infrastructure & Platform Architecture so that our products and solutions are consistent with EA’s technical direction on platform modernization, domain boundaries, integration patterns, event-driven architectures, data contracts, and shared platform capabilities.Shape portfolio-level roadmaps that reduce technical debt, rationalize legacy patterns, and create reusable platforms, paved roads, and golden paths for engineering teams.Influence build, buy, extend, customize, and retire decisions by evaluating business value, complexity, architectural fit, risk, and total cost of ownership.Take part in identifying opportunities to apply generative AI and agentic AI across product and internal workflows. Play a lead role in establishing architecture guardrails for governance, privacy, security, evaluation, and human oversight.Drive measurable improvements in architecture maturity, engineering effectiveness, software quality, system reliability, scalability, security posture, and cost transparency.Represent Enterprise Architecture in senior leadership forums and cross-functional planning processes; contribute to strategic planning, portfolio prioritization, and major initiative reviews.Build strong partnerships across the Product, Commercial, and Engineering organizations, including Product Management, Security, Data, Platform, Operations, and client-facing teams to improve organizational alignment and accelerate delivery.Coach and mentor architects and senior technical leaders, helping grow talent, improve architectural rigor, and create a high-performing, collaborative architecture community.Consistent exercise of independent judgment and discretion in matters of significance.Regular, consistent and punctual attendance.Other duties and responsibilities as assigned.Leadership ExpectationsOperate as a people leader first and an architecture leader always: Build an engaged, high-performing team with clear priorities, accountability, and development plans.Create clarity for both Product and Engineering by framing architecture choices in terms of customer value, market differentiation, technical risk, and time-to-impact.Raise the bar on enterprise and portfolio thinking by promoting reuse, standardization, and platform leverage without slowing innovation.Lead with pragmatism: Enable teams to deliver near-term commitments while steadily driving modernization and reduction of architectural friction.Influence through credibility, relationships, and thoughtful decision-making across organizational boundaries rather than relying solely on authority.Enable healthy technical debate, drive decisions to closure, and ensure architecture guidance is documented, socialized, and actionable.Foster a culture of inclusion, learning, and continuous improvement across the architecture practice and the broader engineering organization.Demonstrate sound judgment in balancing business priorities, operational risks, organizational readiness, and technology strategy.Experience and QualificationsBachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.12+ years of experience in software engineering, software architecture, or enterprise architecture, including significant experience leading architecture for distributed, high-scale platforms.10+ years of people leadership experience managing senior architects, principal engineers, or comparable senior technical individual contributors.Experience partnering with Product Management and Engineering leadership to define architecture strategy, roadmaps, and execution plans for complex product portfolios.Strong knowledge of modern cloud-native architecture, including microservices, Kubernetes, APIs, event-driven systems, resiliency patterns, observability, and security-by-design.Demonstrated ability to lead architectural direction for complex data-intensive and transaction-oriented systems with high requirements for performance, availability, and scale.Experience establishing architecture governance, decision frameworks, standards, and review processes that improve consistency and delivery quality across multiple teams.Strong understanding of security, privacy, identity, integration, and data architecture patterns relevant to large-scale enterprise and product environments.Proven ability to evaluate tradeoffs across build/buy/customize/deprecate strategies and to communicate technical decisions effectively to executive, product, and engineering audiences.Excellent leadership, communication, conflict resolution, and organizational influencing skills.Preferred QualificationsExperience in AdTech, MarTech, media technology, or adjacent digital advertising ecosystems, including familiarity with ad serving, programmatic supply and demand, identity, measurement, or monetization workflows.Experience with premium video, CTV, SSAI, live event monetization, or marketplace platforms is strongly preferred.Experience supporting global product organizations with multiple engineering teams and complex stakeholder environments.Hands-on familiarity with architecture patterns for generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), workflow orchestration, agentic AI, and governance for production AI systems.Experience driving modernization of legacy systems into more modular, platform-oriented, API-first, and event-driven architectures.Experience with FinOps, cost-aware architecture, and engineering practices that improve operational efficiency and cloud spend discipline.Success MeasuresA high-performing Enterprise Architecture team that is trusted by Product and Engineering leadership and consistently engaged on the highest-value strategic initiatives.Improved technology decision quality, clearer product-aligned architecture roadmaps, and stronger alignment between business priorities and engineering execution.Greater consistency in architecture practices, standards, documentation, and governance across FreeWheel’s product portfolio.Observable progress in modernization, technology simplification, risk reduction, reliability, security, and cost efficiency.Stronger cross-functional collaboration and increased feature development velocity across Product and Engineering teams.Employees at all levels are expected to:Understand our Operating Principles; make them the guidelines for how you do your job.Own the customer experience - think and act in ways that put our customers first, give them seamless digital options at every touchpoint, and make them promoters of our products and services.Know your stuff - be enthusiastic learners, users and advocates of our game-changing technology, products and services, especially our digital tools and experiences.Win as a team - make big things happen by working together and being open to new ideas.Be an active part of the Net Promoter System - a way of working that brings more employee and customer feedback into the company - by joining huddles, making call backs and helping us elevate opportunities to do better