Director, Enterprise Architecture – Platform & Infrastructure - (Reston - Hybrid) FreeWheel

Job Summary

Job Description

Core 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 tooling. 
   

Success Measures 

• A trusted Platform Architecture team that is consistently engaged on the highest-value infrastructure, platform, modernization, and engineering effectiveness decisions. 

• Clear, actionable platform architecture roadmaps that align Enterprise Architecture, Platform Engineering, Security, Operations, Data, Product Architecture, and Engineering leadership. 

• Measurable improvements in platform cost efficiency, reliability, scalability, resiliency, operability, security posture, and developer productivity. 

• Increased adoption of standardized platforms, paved roads, golden paths, reference architectures, and reusable shared capabilities. 

• Reduced technology fragmentation, duplicated platform capabilities, infrastructure complexity, operational toil, and unmanaged technical debt. 

• Stronger architectural discipline around cloud and datacenter strategy, Kubernetes, observability, databases, CI/CD, secrets management, developer tooling, and internal platform services. 

• Improved quality and speed of technology decisions with aligned stakeholders – through effective governance, documented tradeoffs, clear standards, and pragmatic exception handling. 

• A strong partnership model between Platform Architecture and Product Architecture, enabling product teams to deliver business value on a consistent, scalable, secure, and cost-efficient foundation. 

• A high-performing architecture organization with strong talent development, credibility, collaboration, and influence across Engineering. 
   

Required Skills 

• Enterprise Architecture 

• Platform Architecture 

• Infrastructure Architecture 

• Cloud Strategy 

• Platform Engineering 

• Kubernetes 

• Cloud-Native Architecture 

• Observability 

• Developer Productivity 

• Engineering Standardization 

• FinOps 

• Technology Governance 

• Strategic Management 

• Stakeholder Management 

• Building High-Performance Teams 

• Business Leadership 
   

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 for our customers. 

• Drive results and growth. 

• Support a culture of inclusion in how you work and lead. 

• Do what's right for each other, our customers, investors and our communities. 

Disclaimer: This information has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees in this role. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities and qualifications.

Skills

Compensation

Base pay is one part of the Total Rewards that Comcast provides to compensate and recognize employees for their work.    Most sales positions are eligible for a Commission under the terms of an applicable plan, while most non-sales positions are eligible for a Bonus.  Additionally, Comcast provides best-in-class Benefits to eligible employees.  We believe that benefits should connect you to the support you need when it matters most, and should help you care for those who matter most.  That’s why we provide an array of options, expert guidance and always-on tools, that are personalized to meet the needs of your reality – to help support you physically, financially and emotionally through the big milestones and in your everyday life. Please visit the compensation and benefits summary on our careers site for more details.

Education

Certifications (if applicable)

Relevant Work Experience