Sr. Dir., Enterprise Technical Architecture

Company Description

It all started in sunny San Diego, California in 2004 when a visionary engineer, Fred Luddy, saw the potential to transform how we work. Fast forward to today — ServiceNow stands as a global market leader, bringing innovative AI-enhanced technology to over 8,100 customers, including 85% of the Fortune 500®. Our intelligent cloud-based platform seamlessly connects people, systems, and processes to empower organizations to find smarter, faster, and better ways to work. But this is just the beginning of our journey. Join us as we pursue our purpose to make the world work better for everyone.

Job Description

Senior Director, Technical Architecture 

Overview

The Senior Director, Technical Architecture serves as a senior technical leader and innovation catalyst within the Enterprise Architecture, Integrations and Services (EAI) organization.

This is a technically diverse role requiring "handson" technical/engineering experience and skills and an evolved leadership profile to influence the adoption and use of architectures. 

We are seeking a technical engineering leader from a very large-scaling environment who has led a team of advanced architects and driven multiple visionary technical architectures from research to POC to solution reference archictures to implementations in multiple enterprise scenarios.

This role reports directly to the VP of EAI and partners closely with Integrations, Services, Enterprise Architecture (EA), Engineering, Solution Architecture, and Product teams to define and evolve ServiceNow’s Enterprise Reference Architectures, advance the company's cloud‑native and AI‑first strategy, and guide the introduction and adoption of new and emerging technologies across the Digital Technology landscape.

This leader drives architectural integrity, accelerates innovation, and scales best‑in‑class patterns across the enterprise while ensuring consistent, secure, and scalable cloud architectures.

Key Responsibilities

Architectural Leadership & Strategy

· Define, evolve, and maintain enterprise-wide Reference Architectures, cloud architectures, and design patterns.

· Drive technology strategy aligned to long‑term business and platform goals, with a strong focus on cloud modernization and optimization.

· Lead evaluation, validation, and adoption of new and emerging technologies, including AI/LLM-based capabilities.

· Champion architectural governance to ensure solutions adhere to standards, patterns, cloud guardrails, and best practices.

Cross‑Functional Collaboration

· Partner closely with the Enterprise Architecture (EA) organization, ensuring alignment on enterprise-wide architectural direction and strategy.

· Collaborate with Solution Architects, driving consistency and reuse across solution designs and delivery.

· Work deeply with the Services Engineering team to ensure architectural integrity across services, accelerators, and delivery tooling.

· Partner with Integration teams to drive modern, scalable, secure integration patterns and ensure seamless interoperability across platforms.

· Engage with Engineering, Product, Integrations, and Services leaders to ensure architectural coherence, quality, and strategic alignment.

· Represent the organization in cross‑functional forums, providing cloud, platform, and AI technical thought leadership.

Innovation & Proofs of Concept (PoCs)

· Lead, design, and execute Proofs of Concept, technology spikes, and feasibility assessments in cloud, integration, platform, and AI/LLM domains.

· Introduce innovative architectural capabilities that enhance scalability, reliability, developer experience, and AI readiness.

Platform, Cloud & Systems Architecture

· Oversee architecture for distributed systems, integrations, cloud-native platforms, and enterprise-grade capabilities.

· Ensure architecture decisions support performance, scalability, resilience, security, and cost efficiency.

· Guide adoption of modern cloud architectures, microservices, API-driven ecosystems, event-driven patterns, and platform‑scale ServiceNow capabilities.

Governance & Standards

· Establish and enforce architectural standards, cloud guardrails, patterns, and best practices across engineering teams.

· Drive alignment across teams to reduce fragmentation, duplication, and technical debt.

· Provide architectural oversight on major initiatives to ensure cloud and platform solution integrity.

Mentorship & Leadership

· Lead and manage a high-performing team of 8–10 Senior Technical Architects, fostering a culture of e