Director, Enterprise Architecture - Platform & Infrastructure - (Reston - Hybrid) 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 SummaryThe Director, Enterprise Architecture – Platform & Infrastructure is the leader responsible for building and leading the Platform Architecture team. This leader defines the long-range architecture strategy, standards, roadmaps, and governance for FreeWheel’s infrastructure and shared platform capabilities, including cloud and datacenter infrastructure, Kubernetes and container platforms, compute, storage, networking, databases, observability, CI/CD, developer tooling, secrets management, identity integration, service connectivity, and related platform technologies. This role is a strategic architecture advisor to the Executive Director of Enterprise Architecture, the CTO organization, Engineering leadership, Platform Engineering, Security, Operations, Data, and Product Architecture. The leader in this role will help shape FreeWheel’s platform modernization agenda, guide investment decisions, improve engineering standardization, reduce technology fragmentation, strengthen operational resilience, and enable Platform Engineering to deliver reusable, scalable, secure, and cost-efficient capabilities for product engineering teams.Job DescriptionCore Responsibilities Lead, develop, and manage a team of Enterprise Architects responsible for platform, infrastructure, and shared engineering capability architecture across FreeWheel. Define and drive the Platform & Infrastructure Architecture vision, operating model, engagement approach, standards, governance mechanisms, and strategic roadmaps. Serve as a strategic architecture advisor to the Executive Director of Enterprise Architecture, helping set priorities, shape the EA agenda, and mature the architecture practice across the organization. Serve as the primary Enterprise Architecture partner to Platform Engineering leadership, providing strategic direction while enabling Platform Engineering to own delivery, operations, and execution of platform capabilities. Establish architectural direction for cloud and datacenter platforms, compute, Kubernetes and container orchestration, managed control planes, serverless platforms, storage, databases, networking, observability, CI/CD, developer experience, secrets management, identity integration, and internal platform services. Shape FreeWheel’s multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructure strategy, including architectural guardrails for workload placement, portability where appropriate, resiliency, operational readiness, cost efficiency, security, and regulatory or business constraints. Develop and maintain reference architectures, platform standards, target-state designs, architecture decision records, technology lifecycle recommendations, and modernization roadmaps. Drive platform modernization and rationalization efforts that reduce legacy complexity, technology fragmentation, operational toil, duplicated capabilities, and unnecessary variance across engineering teams. Define paved roads and golden paths that improve developer productivity while balancing platform consistency, flexibility, reliability, security, and business delivery needs. Guide architectural direction for observability, logging, tracing, metrics, alerting, service health, SLO practices, reliability engineering, incident learning, and operational excellence. Partner with Security and Operations to ensure platform strategies incorporate secure-by-design principles, secrets management, identity, vulnerability management, policy enforcement, auditability, and production readiness. Partner with Finance, Engineering, and Platform Engineering to embed FinOps and cost-aware architecture practices into cloud and platform strategy, including cost transparency, usage efficiency, and informed tradeoff analysis. Influence build, buy, extend, standardize, deprecate, and retire decisions by evaluating and communicating tradeoffs across business value, strategic optionality, architectural fit, resiliency, security, operability, risk, and total cost of ownership. Evaluate emerging technologies, including AI-enabled developer platforms, automation, infrastructure orchestration, and platform engineering tooling, and define pragmatic adoption strategies when they create measurable engineering leverage. Partner closely with Product Architecture so that product-aligned architectures are grounded in shared platform capabilities, standardized integration patterns, reusable infrastructure services, and clear technology guardrails. Coach and mentor architects and principal engineers; foster a high-performing architecture community-of-practice that raises technical rigor and improves decision quality across Engineering. Consistent exercise of independent judgment and discretion in matters of significance. Regular, consistent, and punctual attendance. Other duties and responsibilities as assigned. Leadership Expectations Operate as a people leader first and an architecture leader always: Build an engaged, high-performing Platform Architecture team with clear priorities, accountability, development plans, and strong technical credibility. Act as a trusted advisor to the Executive Director of Enterprise Architecture, the CTO, and other Engineering SLT members by identifying platform risks, modernization opportunities, organizational friction, and priority decisions requiring executive alignment. Architecture partner to Platform Engineering: Provide clear strategic direction, standards, and target-state guidance while maintaining a healthy distinction between architecture leadership and engineering delivery ownership. Drive decisions to closure: Facilitate healthy technical debate, make tradeoffs explicit, document decisions, and ensure architecture guidance is actionable and socialized. Lead with pragmatism: Balance long-term modernization, operational risk reduction, and near-term business delivery commitments. Raise the level of executive communication: Translate complex platform, infrastructure, and technology tradeoffs into clear business, risk, cost, and delivery implications for senior stakeholders. Foster a culture of inclusion, learning, and continuous improvement across the architecture practice and the broader Engineering organization. Build an inclusive technical culture: Model collaboration, learning, transparency, and respect across Architecture, Engineering, Platform, Operations, Product, Security, and Data teams. Experience and Qualifications Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field; advanced degree or equivalent practical experience preferred. 12+ years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, cloud architecture, enterprise architecture, or related technology leadership roles. 5+ years of people leadership experience managing architects, principal engineers, platform architects, infrastructure architects, or comparable senior technical contributors. Demonstrated experience defining architecture strategy and roadmaps for large-scale distributed systems, infrastructure platforms, cloud environments, or high-volume digital technology platforms. Deep knowledge of cloud-native architecture, Kubernetes, containers, serverless, infrastructure automation, networking, storage, databases, observability, CI/CD, developer platforms, and security-by-design practices. Strong understanding of hybrid infrastructure, datacenter modernization, multi-cloud strategy, workload placement, resiliency architecture, operational readiness, and platform lifecycle management. Prior experience leading migrations of large, complex workloads between hyperscalers. Experience establishing architecture governance, standards, review processes, exception management, reference architectures, and technology decision frameworks across multiple teams or business domains. Experience partnering with Platform Engineering, Infrastructure, Operations, Security, Data, Product Architecture, and senior Engineering leadership to align architecture strategy with execution realities. Proven ability to evaluate architectural tradeoffs across reliability, scalability, performance, security, operability, cost, developer productivity, time-to-market, and organizational readiness. Experience with FinOps, cost-aware architecture, cloud spend governance, capacity planning, or infrastructure efficiency programs. Excellent executive communication, stakeholder management, conflict resolution, organizational influence, and talent development skills. Preferred Qualifications Hands-on familiarity with technologies and practices such as Kubernetes managed control planes, service mesh, API gateways, secrets management, policy-as-code, infrastructure-as-code, observability platforms, automated delivery pipelines, and database platform strategy. Experience in AdTech, MarTech, media technology, SaaS, marketplace platforms, digital advertising, or similarly high-scale, low-latency, distributed, data-intensive environments. Experience supporting globally distributed engineering organizations and platforms with high availability, high throughput, and complex operational requirements. Experience leading or influencing platform engineering transformation, developer experience improvements, internal developer platforms, service catalog adoption, or golden path strategies. Experience modernizing legacy infrastructure and application platforms into more modular, cloud-native, automated, and operationally efficient environments. Experience with AI-enabled engineering productivity, automation, platform intelligence, or architecture governance