Principal Enterprise Architect

What’s needed to succeed (Minimum Qualifications):

• Bachelor's degree
• Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or related field preferred
• 7+ of relevant experience
• Ability to partner within and across teams to gain consensus and enable change
• Ability to influence stakeholders
• Ability to drive tasks to completion
• Strong communication skills for creating and sharing presentations to multiple levels of audiences of stakeholders - i.e. senior executives in business and IT, architects, developers, etc.
• Prior experience as a Principal Enterprise Architect, Chief Architect, Head of Enterprise Architecture in a global organization
• Experience providing guidance and defining strategy for how companies should deal with technology
• Work with Domain Architects and Solution Architects in preparation for Architecture Review Board (ARB), Architecture Portfolio Management,
• Architecture Assessment
• Provide guidance, oversight, and coaching to the Domain and Solution architects
• Review and sign off architecture designs
• Drive improvements of architecture processes, methodologies, and services, ensuring the quality of architecture assets
• Develop architecture metrics and plans to achieve results
• Technical writing skills for documenting environments and procedures
• Deep hands-on experience in leading the design, development and deployment of business software at scale
• Deep hands-on experience of technology infrastructure, network, compute, storage, and virtualization
• Deep experience with Cloud computing technologies and workload transition challenges
• Prior experience of managing challenges of migrating systems and workloads to the Cloud
• Experience with AWS application migration and implementations 
• Deep understanding of cloud computing technologies and workload transition challenges
• Broad knowledge in EA domains\: Business Process Architecture, Infrastructure Architecture, Applications Architecture, Information Architecture
• Knowledge of best practices in Enterprise Architecture
• Understand business strategy and priorities (i.e., strategic capabilities), and work with architecture domains to align strategy
• Architecture framework (TOGAF, Zachman, etc.)
• Strategic thinking abilities and an enterprise-wide perspective
• Team building skills.
• Conflict resolution skills.
• Enterprise architecture philosophy, approach, and methodology
• Selling skills (influence, communication, facilitation, story-telling)
• Exposure to multiple, diverse technologies and processing environments
• Ability to communicate effectively (written and oral) in English
• Strong desire to learn new technologies
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States for any employer without sponsorship
• Successful completion of interview required to meet job qualification
• Reliable, punctual attendance is an essential function of the position

What will help you propel from the pack (Preferred Qualifications):

• Master's degree in Computer Science
• AWS Certified Solution Architect - Professional certification or better (Solution Architect, Developer, or SysOps) 
• Hold a qualification in Enterprise Architecture Certification (Zachman, Togaf, Gartner)
• 3+ years of AWS and/or Enterprise Architecture experience

United's Digital Technology team is comprised of many talented individuals all working together with cutting-edge technology to build the best airline in the history of aviation. Our team designs, develops and maintains massively scaling technology solutions brought to life with innovative architectures, data analytics, and digital solutions.

Job overview and responsibilities

The Principal Enterprise Architect will play a key role in influencing United Airline’s IT digital strategy as well as providing tactical architecture direction to ensure the enterprise can achieve the strategy. This individual will provide strategic advice and guidance to functional team(s). Highly skilled with broad, advanced technical and cloud experience especially related to IT disciplines. This role serves as a thought leader to challenge/direct all levels across the organization to rethink routine, embrace new best practices, and drive adoption of technology standards. The individual will also apply enterprise architecture governance over solutions that provide technical capabilities.

• Collaborate with domain architects, engineers, and leaders to develop technical standards, reference architectures, design patterns, opinion papers, and architecture decision frameworks that guide the design of technology solutions, especially those requiring integration of multiple platforms, operating systems, and applications across the enterprise
• Develop and manage a technical strategy and coordinates adoption
• This role will be responsible to architect enterprise guidance that conveys best practices and common pitfalls for system design, infrastructure integrations, application development practices, and application runtime principles
• Manage the architecture review process by creating validation checklists, reviewing architectural artifacts, and providing domain specific guidance to drive architectural alignment across the enterprise
• Leads cultural change for United cloud adoption
• This role will actively promote cloud services where appropriate within the organization to ensure that the organization properly architects business solutions for cloud
• The role must push the organization through thought leadership to incorporate cloud computing accurately and effectively
• Apply architectural and engineering concepts to design solutions that meet operational requirements, such as scalability, maintainability, security, reliability, extensibility, flexibility, availability, and manageability
• Conduct research and develop Proof of Concepts on emerging technologies and implementation toolkits in support of anticipated development efforts and recommend technologies that functionally robust and cost effective
• Research, enforce, and drive the adoption of design patterns throughout the enterprise and evangelizes best practices for solution design and development
• Identify new technologies, industry trends, and best practices, which should be incorporated into BFS policies & roadmap
• Plays a critical role in translating business strategy into technical strategy and defines end-to-end technology architectures that support the strategy
• Lead all aspects of the evaluation and selection of 3rd party software packages (including SaaS) as well as the design of standard application configuration of these packages
• Develop and maintain relevant Enterprise Architecture artifacts and store within the EA repository, including – current state architecture, standards, reference architectures, capability maps