Director, Digital Consulting | Enterprise Architecture

Trace3•Irvine, CA

8d•Hybrid

About The Position

Trace3 is expanding its team of Enterprise Architecture leaders across complementary specialties; successful candidates may be very deep in one primary domain, such as Security, Cloud, Data, AI, Platform Engineering, Resilience, or Enterprise Applications, while demonstrating the judgment and curiosity to stretch across adjacent domains. In addition to driving account growth, executive relationships, and delivery quality, this Director serves as a technical-continuity owner across the account and as part of a broader architecture bench that collectively covers Trace3’s key domains. The role connects architecture and technology decisions to business strategy and funded outcomes, ensures solution coherence across Cloud, Data, AI, Security, and related domains, and gives Trace3 credibility with CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, architects, and engineering teams. This is a hands-on leadership role: the Director remains close enough to the work to review infrastructure-as-code, platform configurations, and engineering designs directly, stabilize accounts under pressure, and lead through influence, technical judgment, and commercial awareness.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree (Master's preferred) in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or related field.
12+ years in enterprise or solution architecture, technology strategy, principal engineering, or technical advisory, with demonstrated client-facing leadership and measurable outcomes.
Deep technical depth in one or more relevant enterprise architecture domains, with practical fluency across adjacent domains such as Cloud, Data, AI, Security, Platform Engineering, Resilience, Enterprise Applications, and Integration.
AI-native working fluency: uses AI tooling as a normal part of the job to accelerate analysis, generate client-grade artifacts, and prototype ideas quickly, with the judgment to validate outputs before they reach a client. This is about how the candidate works, not only what they architect.
Demonstrated ability to connect architecture to business strategy and funded roadmaps, and to influence CIOs, CTOs, architects, and engineers.
Ability to work in a team-of-architects model where coverage, specialization, reference architectures, and quality standards are coordinated across accounts rather than owned by one individual alone.
Experience shaping technically credible pursuits and multi-domain solutions; ability to grow accounts without needing to be a traditional salesperson.
Executive presence with strong communication; sufficient digital-account-lead breadth and delivery accountability to be effective beyond architecture alone.

Nice To Haves

Architecture credentials, such as TOGAF, and platform certifications across cloud, data, AI, or security.
Experience with well-architected reviews, resilience and reliability engineering, or reference-architecture development at enterprise scale.
Depth in one of the target architect sub-types, such as enterprise security, cloud infrastructure, data and AI, platform engineering, resilience, enterprise applications, integration, or regulated-industry architecture.
Demonstrated use of AI-assisted development and content tooling to compress delivery cycles, and a point of view on where it is and is not appropriate in client work.
Experience designing or securing agentic AI workloads, or establishing governance and guardrails for AI platforms in an enterprise environment.
Prior experience operating in a two-in-the-box or account-team model with sales and delivery partners.

Responsibilities

Provide the account's architecture point of view: reference architectures, target-state design, and technology decisions tied to business cases.
Ensure multi-domain solution coherence and non-functional integrity across engagements.
Originate and shape technically credible pursuits and multi-domain programs.
Elevate Trace3's standing with technical executives and engineering stakeholders.
Operate as part of a complementary Enterprise Architecture team, bringing a distinctive domain spike while collaborating with other architect sub-types to provide full-stack coverage across Trace3’s priority domains.
Serve as the named Digital Account Lead for assigned flagship and enterprise accounts when designated, or as the senior architecture lead within another Director's account strategy and governance model when a different Digital Account Lead owns the overall client outcome.
Build and maintain the account strategy, executive relationship plan, stakeholder and initiative maps, engagement history, account roadmap, opportunity priorities, and cross-domain expansion thesis.
Originate, qualify, shape, and advance pursuits that align to client priorities, Trace3's right-to-win, and available delivery capabilities.
Orchestrate account, sales, domain, practice, business-unit, partner, and delivery leaders around one integrated account strategy and client experience.
Maintain sufficient proximity to every active engagement to independently understand delivery health, client sentiment, scope, financial position, major dependencies, risks, solution integrity, and progress toward the business case.
Bring in peer Directors and specialists when another domain is required.
On accounts led by another Director, operate as the domain lead within the named Digital Account Lead's account strategy and governance model.
Own account-level architecture continuity: current-state assessment, target-state and reference architectures, technology selection, and non-functional requirements across the Director's primary domain and adjacent Trace3 domains, including Cloud, Data, AI, Security, Platform Engineering, Resilience, Enterprise Applications, and Integration where relevant.
Review and provide substantive feedback on key technical and architectural areas (or work with SMEs to do so)
Ensure solutions across engagements to integrate coherently and align to Trace3 well-architected and resilience standards.
Serve as the senior technical authority in client and internal forums; guide engineers, architects, and practice teams without owning line management of them.
Connect architecture decisions to business strategy, cost, risk, and measurable outcomes.
Collaborate with peer Enterprise Architecture Directors to assemble the right architecture team for each account, balancing deep domain expertise with cross-domain integration and commercial relevance.
Author architecture decision records, reference patterns, and standards as a normal part of the work—capturing the decision, constraints, alternatives, and rationale so the reasoning survives beyond the engagement and the individual.
Champion delivery quality, governance, risk management, and benefits realization on complex, multi-workstream programs.
Guide solution quality across transformation initiatives; ensure adoption and value tracking.
Own escalations and account recovery.
Step into engagements that are blocked, degraded, or off-plan—including access and environment failures, platform and integration blockers, delivery or reporting gaps, and disputes over scope, hours, or commercial terms—and drive them to resolution with the client and internal teams.
Mentor and develop technical consultants and architects; build architecture leverage across the account team.
Productize the account’s success model.
Where an approach or methodology demonstrably works, drive into a documented, transferable playbook that other account teams can adopt without the original author present.
Contribute reference architectures, accelerators, and frameworks to the relevant product lines and Guilds.