Executive Director of Platform Architecture

Job Title: Executive Director, Platform Architecture

Location: Chicago, IL (Onsite – Hybrid - 3 days in a week)

Position Type: Fulltime permanent position

Responsibilities:

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
• Unix/Linux environments; artifact management (Nexus, Artifactory)

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)

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
• Lead platform architecture participation in incident postmortems; ensure operational findings drive durable infrastructure improvements