POSITION SUMMARY:

We are seeking a hands‑on Principal Enterprise Architect who will serve as the senior-most architecture leader across platforms, applications, data, and cloud. This role sets the strategic direction for our next‑generation digital ecosystem—including microservices, event-driven architecture, DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering—and also leads a team of architects (solution architects, platform architects, data architects, and domain architects).

This leader drives both architecture strategy and people leadership: shaping the roadmap, mentoring and developing architects, reviewing designs, and ensuring technology decisions align with business outcomes. The role blends thought leadership, execution excellence, and strong architectural governance.

This is an onsite position, located in Springfield, Missouri. Qualified candidates must either be local or willing to relocate to the area. Relocation assistance is provided, if necessary.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:

Enterprise Architecture Leadership

• Own and evolve the enterprise architecture vision, blueprint, and multi‑year roadmap.
• Lead execution of modern architectural patterns including domain‑driven design, microservices, event-driven integration, cloud-native platforms, and API-first ecosystems.
• Head the Architecture Review Board (ARB); establish decision frameworks and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).

People Leadership & Organizational Development

• Directly lead and manage a team of architects, providing coaching, 1:1s, performance development, and career growth.
• Build and mature the architecture practice, including standards, reusable patterns, reference architectures, templates, and best practices.
• Foster a strong culture of collaboration, continuous learning, technical excellence, and psychological safety across architecture and engineering.
• Provide thought leadership and partner closely with Engineering Managers, Product, Security, and Infrastructure leadership to drive alignment.
• Support the recruitment, onboarding, and development of top architecture talent; identify skill gaps and create development plans.

Platform Engineering, DevOps & SRE

• Define the enterprise strategy for DevOps, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, GitOps, and platform engineering (“golden paths” and self‑service developer platforms).
• Establish and enforce SRE practices—SLO/SLI definitions, error budgets, observability, incident response, resilience engineering, and performance/scalability patterns.
• Drive adoption of Zero Downtime, Canary, Blue/Green, and progressive delivery strategies.

Cloud, Security & Data Architecture

• Lead cloud strategy and architecture: multi-account landing zones, networking, service mesh, identity, secrets, encryption, policy-as-code, DR/HA, and FinOps optimization.
• Oversee data architecture patterns (streaming pipelines, CDC, lake/lakehouse, governance, lineage, quality, cataloging).
• Ensure alignment with enterprise security standards and partner with security architecture on threat modeling, secure design, and compliance.

Solution & Delivery Leadership

• Provide architectural oversight for key programs—review designs, approve patterns, unblock teams, and support high-risk technical initiatives.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to engineering leadership and senior business stakeholders.
• Communicate architectural decisions, trade-offs, and impacts clearly to executives and delivery teams.

EXPERIENCE/QUALIFICATIONS:

• Minimum Degree Required:    Bachelor's Degree
• 12–15+ years in software/architectural leadership roles; 5+ years leading other architects or senior engineers.
• Proven experience delivering cloud-native, microservices, and event-driven systems at scale.
• Deep hands-on knowledge of Kubernetes, service mesh (Istio/Linkerd), CI/CD pipelines, IaC (Terraform/Bicep), and observability (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana).
• Strong understanding of data platforms (relational, NoSQL, caching, streaming), event streaming platforms (Kafka/Kinesis/PubSub), and API frameworks (REST/G