Executive Director, Platform Architecture (Chicago)

Job title: Executive Director, Platform Architecture

Location: Chicago, will consider Dallas, TX

Position: Permanent

Hybrid 3 days onsite in a week

• The Executive Director, Platform Architecture leads CLIENT's Platform Architecture team, owning the technical strategy and standards for all infrastructure domains cloud, onpremises, 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 CLIENT'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 CLIENT's technology transformation including the Renaissance/Ovation program and ongoing cloud adoption.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities:

• To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each primary duty satisfactorily.
• Lead the Platform Architecture Team
• 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

Define and Govern Platform Architecture Standards

• 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 CLIENT'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
• Drive Infrastructure Modernization and Cloud Strategy
• Own CLIENT'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 GitOps 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

Partner across the Organization

• 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 CLIENT's regulatory obligations under Regulation SCI and CPMI‑IOSCO resilience principles

Ensure Operational Resilience

• Establish observability standards metrics, logging, distributed tracing, and alerting as platform‑level capabilities delivered to all application teams
• Define and govern disaster recovery, business continuity, and resilience architecture across infrastructure domains
• Drive capacity planning and performance engineering practices; ensure the platform is sized and architected ahead of demand, not reactive to it

Supervisory Responsibilities

• Manages a team of principal architects and senior individual contributors across infrastructure architecture domains

Qualifications:

• The requirements listed are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required.
• Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the primary functions.

Required

• 12+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or systems architecture, with at least 3 years in a people leadership or team lead role
• Demonstrated experience defining and governing infrastructure architecture standards across multiple domains at organizational scale
• Broad, hands‑on knowledge across infrastructure domains:
• cloud (AWS), on‑premises data center, networking, compute, storage, and container platforms
• Deep experience with AWS architecture — VPCs, EC2, EKS, MSK, S3, IAM, KMS, Direct Connect, Transit Gateway, and security services
• Strong working knowledge of Kubernetes — cluster architecture, workload design, multi‑tenancy, networking (CNI), and operational patterns at scale
• Experience with Apache Kafka as enterprise streaming infrastructure — deployment, operations, and topology design
• Demonstrated experience leading GitOps and infrastructure‑as‑code programs — Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, Flux, or equivalent
• Experience with hybrid and on‑premises/cloud connectivity architecture — network design, routing, firewalling, and security zoning
• Ability to lead through influence and authority building alignment across Engineering, Security, Operations, and Governance
• Strong communication skills able to represent infrastructure strategy to executive leadership and translate architecture decisions into actionable standards for engineering teams

Preferred

• Experience in financial services, particularly regulated environments (SIFMU, clearinghouse, exchange, or bank)
• Familiarity with Regulation SCI, CPMI‑IOSCO, or equivalent financial market infrastructure regulatory frameworks and their implications for infrastructure design
• Experience with Apache Flink or equivalent stream processing frameworks in production environments
• Experience with enterprise observability platforms — OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or equivalent
• Familiarity with low‑latency and high‑performance computing patterns relevant to risk and clearing workloads AWS Solutions Architect — Professional certification or equivalent
• Experience with enterprise architecture frameworks such as TOGAF

Technical Skills

• Cloud: AWS foundational and advanced services — EC2, EKS, MSK, S3, VPC, IAM, KMS, Direct Connect, Transit Gateway, CloudWatch
• Container platforms: Kubernetes (EKS or self‑managed), Docker, Helm, container networking (CNI)
• Streaming and processing: Apache Kafka, Apache Flink
• GitOps and IaC: Terraform, ArgoCD, Flux, Helm, GitHub Actions or Jenkins
• Networking: routing protocols, firewalling, load balancing, DNS, hybrid connectivity, network security zoning
• Storage: block, object, and file storage architecture; backup and recovery patterns
• Observability: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or equivalent

Education and/or Experience

• BS degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Mathematics, or a similar technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 12+ years of relevant work experience.

Certificates or Licenses

• AWS Solutions Architect — Associate or Professional (preferred)