Sr Director Digital Foundations Architecture - 90416778 - Remote

Your success is a train ride away!

As we move America’s workforce toward the future, Amtrak connects businesses and communities across the country. We employ more than 20,000 diverse, energetic professionals in a variety of career fields throughout the United States. The safety of our passengers, our employees, the public and our operating environment is our priority, and the success of our railroad is due to our employees.

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Our values of ‘Do the Right Thing, Excel Together and Put Customers First’ are at the heart of what matters most to us, and our Core Capabilities, ‘Building Trust, Accountability, Effective Communication, Customer Focus, and Proactive Safety & Security’ are what every employee needs to know and do to be most impactful at Amtrak. By living the Amtrak values, focusing on our capabilities, and actively embracing and fostering diverse ideas, backgrounds, and perspectives, together we will honor our past and make Amtrak a company of the future.

Job Summary

The Sr. Director, Digital Foundations Architecture provides enterprise architecture leadership for the foundational technology capabilities on which Amtrak’s digital services depend. The role aligns infrastructure strategy and investment with corporate goals while advancing a resilient, automated, observable, secure, and supportable technology foundation. Through architecture governance, technical leadership, engineering enablement, and clear decision guidance, this senior Digital Technology leader accelerates delivery, maximizes return on technology investment, and reduces operational cost and risk.

The Sr. Director defines and communicates current, transitional, and target-state architectures and roadmaps for advanced networking and connectivity, cloud infrastructure and IaaS, compute, infrastructure-as-code and automation, observability and resilience, service delivery, and technology operations. The role establishes reusable patterns and reference architectures and partners with Platform, Cybersecurity, Data, Engineering, Product, and Operations teams to translate enterprise strategy into capabilities. As an Enterprise Architect and people leader, the Sr. Director develops architecture talent, strengthens technical depth, and connects strategic direction to practical engineering and operational outcomes. The successful candidate combines enterprise architecture leadership with demonstrated hands-on experience designing and operating large, complex infrastructure environments in which reliability, operational readiness, automation, lifecycle management, and customer service are as important as technology selection.

As a senior people leader they will provide direction and development of leaders and teams to move architecture and business objectives forward.

Essential Functions

• Own and communicate the architectural vision for core enterprise infrastructure capabilities, establishing patterns and reference architectures that improve consistency, reuse, resilience, and operational supportability.
• Define and govern current, transitional, and target-state architecture across advanced networking and connectivity, hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure, IaaS, compute, data center and edge infrastructure, infrastructure automation, observability, resilience, service delivery, and technology operations.
• Govern and direct enterprise principles, patterns standards and guidance for how infrastructure is designed, provisioned, connected, deployed, monitored, operated, maintained, recovered, and retired.
• Define and govern the infrastructure architecture interface with the Security domain. Cybersecurity and physical security policy, architecture, risk, and control ownership remain with their respective partner domains; Digital Foundations Architecture is accountable for translating those requirements into infrastructure patterns and designs and validating that required controls are implemented.
• Drive and produce infrastructure-as-code and automation as default delivery mechanisms where practical, including reusable modules, automated provisioning, configuration management, policy enforcement, testing, and continuous delivery practices.
• Establish architecture expectations for observability, telemetry, capacity, performance, high availability, disaster recovery, lifecycle management, and operational readiness so foundational services can be measured, supported, and recovered.
• Ensure the reference architectures, standards, and guidelines of the organization's technology is safe, secure, stable and compliant with industry standards.
• Champion organizational design, enterprise strategy, innovation leadership for the architecture practice
• Lead and mentor a team of architects, providing guidance and fostering a culture of excellence.
• Create and provide senior leadership steering of strategic roadmaps and comprehensive transition plans that show how foundational technology will evolve to support business strategy over time and how initiatives should be prioritized by value, risk, resilience, technical debt, and dependencies.
• Guide Investment Decisions Aligning technology plans and investments to business vision and strategy that is necessary to ensure we are building the right things.
• Provide senior leadership steering in the design, governance, and oversight for implementing robust, scalable, and efficient architectural solutions for domain business problems.

Domain Scope

• Advanced Networking & Connectivity: enterprise LAN/WAN, SD-WAN, wireless, cloud networking, edge, segmentation, routing/switching, resilient connectivity, and network automation.
• Cloud & Compute Foundations: IaaS, landing-zone foundations, virtual networking, hybrid connectivity, compute, data center, edge, and lifecycle architecture.
• Infrastructure Automation: infrastructure-as-code, configuration automation, reusable modules, automated provisioning, policy controls, and CI/CD integration.
• Service Delivery & Operations: operational readiness, service ownership, monitoring, incident/problem/change considerations, production stability, supportability, lifecycle, capacity, and recovery.
• Observability, Reliability & Resilience: telemetry, service health, high availability, disaster recovery, dependency visibility, performance and capacity architecture.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, data and intelligence or related field with 15+ year’s relevant architecture or technology experience or equivalent work experience.
• Experience creating significant business value realization with $1B+ or more enterprises as an architect providing vision and choosing platforms moving organizations forward and scaled for expanding future initiatives.
• 11+ years of relevant technical and business managerial experience with 2 to 3 years leading an Architecture Practice area.
• Requires leadership experience in managing architecture teams and influencing executive level management and key stakeholders.
• Requires demonstrated ability to manage multiple architecture engagement and effectively plan and use staff to ensure the architecture view.
• Previous experience shaping enterprise architecture vision and leading an org-wide transformation and culture shift to that vision
• Must possess strong communication and interpersonal skills, work well with others in an integrated team environment, and must be self-motivated.
• Must possess a mastery of business acumen
• Relationship building and collaboration skills across diverse and matrixed stakeholders and customers.
• Ability to surface, prioritize, and balance priorities across multiple stakeholders.
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills, including experience leveraging data to inform decision-making.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree in business engineering, computer science, information systems, or a related field, particularly where the program emphasizes enterprise technology strategy, organizational leadership, or complex systems.
• Critical infrastructure experience or experience supporting large, distributed, mission-critical enterprises.
• Experience applying enterprise networking, AWS and/or Azure infrastructure, infrastructure-as-code, observability, service management, and reliability practices in large-scale, hybrid, and 24x7 operational environments.
• Experience with governance, risk, regulatory and compliance.
• Experience spanning multiple architecture domains, including business, application/solution, technical/infrastructure, platform, security, and information/data architecture.
• Experience with modern engineering and delivery practices such as Git-based workflows, CI/CD, reusable infrastructure modules, automated testing and policy controls, and configuration management.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent applied experience.
• 15+ years’ experience in relevant industry experience
• 11+ years in managing talent.
• Experience managing teams.
• Strong understanding of enterprise architecture best practices, value methodology, reference architectures, reusable patterns, standards, and roadmaps.
• Deep knowledge of how networking, cloud and hybrid infrastructure, compute, data center and edge services, automation, observability, resilience, recovery, service delivery, and technology operations interact as an enterprise foundation.
• Working knowledge of cybersecurity architecture and controls sufficient to embed security requirements into infrastructure designs and partner effectively with the Security domain.
• Ability to move comfortably between strategic target-state discussions, detailed technical tradeoffs, delivery sequencing, and operational readiness concerns.

Environmental Conditions/Physical Demands

The salary/hourly range is $206,200.00 – $267,192.00. Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to education, work experience, certifications, etc. Depending on an employee’s assigned worksite or location, Amtrak may consider a geo-pay differential to be applied to the employee’s base salary. Amtrak may offer additional incentive and pay programs to recognize and reward our employees, including a short-term incentive bonus based upon factors such as individual and company performance that is commensurate with the level of the position.

Learn more about our benefits offerings here.

Requisition ID: 167467

Work Arrangement: 02-Remote Optional Click here for more information about work arrangements at Amtrak.
Relocation Offered: No
Travel Requirements: Up to 25%

You power our progress through your performance.

We want your work at Amtrak to be more than a job. We want your career at Amtrak to be a fulfilling experience where you find challenging work, rewarding opportunities, respect among colleagues, and attractive compensation. Amtrak maintains a culture that values high performance and recognizes individual employee contributions.

Amtrak is committed to a safe workplace free of drugs and alcohol. All Amtrak positions requires a pre-employment background check that includes prior employment verification, a criminal history check and a pre-employment drug screen.

Candidates who test positive for marijuana will be disqualified, regardless of any state or local statute, ordinance, regulation, or other law that legalizes or decriminalizes the use or possession of marijuana, whether for medical, recreational, or other use. Amtrak's pre-employment drug testing program is administered in accordance with DOT regulations and applicable law.

In accordance with DOT regulations (49 CFR § 40.25), Amtrak is required to obtain prior drug and alcohol testing records for applicants/employees intending to perform safety-sensitive duties for covered Department of Transportation positions. If an applicant/employee refuses to provide written consent for Amtrak to obtain these records, the individual will not be permitted to perform safety-sensitive functions.

In accordance with federal law governing security checks of covered individuals for providers of public transportation (Title 6 U.S.C. §1143), Amtrak is required to screen applicants for any permanent or interim disqualifying criminal offenses.

Note that any education requirement listed above may be deemed satisfied if you have an equivalent combination of education, training and experience.

Amtrak is an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race/color, to include traits historically associated with race, including but not limited to, hair texture and hairstyles such as braids, locks and twists, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth and related conditions, such as lactation), national origin/ethnicity, disability (intellectual, mental and physical), veteran status, marital status, ancestry, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, genetic information, citizenship or any other personal characteristics protected by law.