Executive Director, Platform Architecture

OCC • Chicago, IL

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Executive Director, Platform Architecture leads OCC's Platform Architecture team, owning the technical strategy and standards for all infrastructure domains — cloud, onpremises, networking, compute, storage, and observability. This is a people leadership role responsible for developing a team of principal architects and ensuring their work produces coherent, enterprise-wide platform standards rather than isolated domain expertise. The Executive Director, Platform Architecture translates OCC's resilience objectives and regulatory obligations into actionable platform architecture strategy, drives adoption of that strategy across Engineering and Operations, and ensures the platform layer keeps pace with OCC's technology transformation — including the Renaissance/Ovation program and ongoing cloud adoption.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or systems architecture, with at least 3 years in a people leadership or team lead role
• Demonstrated experience defining and governing infrastructure architecture standards across multiple domains at organizational scale
• Broad, hands-on knowledge across infrastructure domains: cloud (AWS), on-premises data center, networking, compute, storage, and container platforms
• Deep experience with AWS architecture — VPCs, EC2, EKS, MSK, S3, IAM, KMS, Direct Connect, Transit Gateway, and security services
• Strong working knowledge of Kubernetes — cluster architecture, workload design, multi-tenancy, networking (CNI), and operational patterns at scale
• Experience with Apache Kafka as enterprise streaming infrastructure — deployment, operations, and topology design
• Demonstrated experience leading GitOps and infrastructure-as-code programs — Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, Flux, or equivalent
• Experience with hybrid and on-premises/cloud connectivity architecture — network design, routing,firewalling, and security zoning
• Ability to lead through influence and authority — building alignment across Engineering, Security, Operations, and Governance
• Strong communication skills — able to represent infrastructure strategy to executive leadership and translate architecture decisions into actionable standards for engineering teams
• BS degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Mathematics, or a similar technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 12+ years of relevant work experience.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in financial services, particularly regulated environments (SIFMU, clearinghouse, exchange, or bank)
• Familiarity with Regulation SCI, CPMI-IOSCO, or equivalent financial market infrastructure regulatory frameworks and their implications for infrastructure design
• Experience with Apache Flink or equivalent stream processing frameworks in production environments
• Experience with enterprise observability platforms — OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or equivalent
• Familiarity with low-latency and high-performance computing patterns relevant to risk and clearing workloads
• AWS Solutions Architect — Professional certification or equivalent
• Experience with enterprise architecture frameworks such as TOGAF
• AWS Solutions Architect — Associate or Professional (preferred)

Responsibilities

• Lead the Platform Architecture Team: Lead, develop, and set direction for a team of principal architects covering cloud, on-premises infrastructure, networking, compute, storage, and observability domains
• Own the Platform Architecture vision: deliver the resilient, scalable foundation upon which critical market functions depend — making resilience the default, not the exception
• Ensure individual architect domain expertise is synthesized into coherent, enterprise-wide platform standards — not siloed recommendations
• Manage team priorities, capacity, and delivery against architecture commitments across programs and initiatives
• Develop team members through coaching, feedback, and exposure to enterprise-scale architectural challenges
• Establish and maintain authoritative platform architecture standards spanning cloud (AWS), on-premises data center, hybrid connectivity, networking, compute, storage, and container platforms
• Define reference architectures and infrastructure patterns that Engineering and application teams can consume without requiring per-project architecture engagement
• Own non-functional requirements standards at the platform level — availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, latency, throughput, and capacity — as first-class concerns applicable across all tiers of OCC's system portfolio
• Enforce platform standards through Architecture Review Board participation and design review processes
• Maintain infrastructure architecture documentation, ADRs, and transition plans that accurately reflect current and target state
• Own OCC's infrastructure architecture strategy for cloud adoption — defining what moves to AWS, what remains on-premises, and how hybrid connectivity is structured
• Ensure cloud architecture patterns for networking, security, identity, and compute are consistent, compliant, and operationally sound across all workloads
• Drive GitOps and infrastructure-as-code adoption — pipeline standards, environment promotion, configuration management, and secrets management at enterprise scale
• Lead architecture direction for container platform (Kubernetes/EKS), streaming infrastructure (Kafka), and stream processing (Flink) as foundational platform capabilities
• Identify and systematically reduce infrastructure risk — single points of failure, end-of-life dependencies, capacity constraints, and gaps in recovery capabilities
• Serve as the primary platform architecture partner to Application Architecture, ensuring application designs are grounded in platform reality and platform capabilities evolve to meet application needs
• Collaborate with Engineering, Security, and Operations to ensure platform architecture decisions are implementable, operable, and aligned to security requirements
• Engage with Technology Leads, program management, and senior leadership to represent platform architecture in strategic planning, budgeting, and vendor decisions
• Coordinate with Governance/Risk and Compliance to ensure platform architecture satisfies OCC's regulatory obligations under Regulation SCI and CPMI-IOSCO resilience principles
• Establish observability standards — metrics, logging, distributed tracing, and alerting — as platform-level capabilities delivered to all application teams
• Define and govern disaster recovery, business continuity, and resilience architecture across infrastructure domains
• Drive capacity planning and performance engineering practices; ensure the platform is sized and architected ahead of demand, not reactive to it
• Lead platform architecture participation in incident postmortems; ensure operational findings drive durable infrastructure improvements

Benefits

• A hybrid work environment, up to 2 days per week of remote work
• Tuition Reimbursement to support your continued education
• Student Loan Repayment Assistance
• Technology Stipend allowing you to use the device of your choice to connect to our network while working remotely
• Generous PTO and Parental leave
• Competitive health benefits including medical, dental and vision
• 401k Employer Match

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees