Head of Architecture

Halliburton•Houston, TX

12d•Onsite

About The Position

As Director of Architecture at Landmark, you will own the architectural coherence of a decentralized engineering organization. You will not own the engineers who build the products. You will own the standards, the community, and the alignment mechanisms that allow independently operating teams to build components that work together. Landmark’s engineering organization is structured around autonomous product and platform teams, each with embedded principal engineers who carry architectural accountability within their scope. Your job is to connect those principal engineers into a network, align them on the shared patterns that make individual team decisions add up to a coherent system, and build the governance mechanisms that keep that coherence as the organization evolves. The engineering design problem you are solving is composability. In an environment where capabilities need to be assembled and reassembled in response to market conditions, the contracts between components — including APIs, identity flows, event schemas, data models, and agentic interaction patterns — must be deliberately designed, consistently applied, and governed through a community that owns them. You will define those contracts and build the community that maintains them. You will work with a small team of staff-level architects. Your organizational reach extends to every principal and staff engineer at Landmark through the architecture community you build and lead.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, or related STEM discipline, or equivalent professional experience
12+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time spent on distributed systems, platform architecture, or cross-team integration problems
Demonstrated track record of defining and driving adoption of architectural standards across a large, distributed engineering organization, accomplished through community, credibility, and the quality of the standards themselves rather than mandate
Deep expertise in API design and distributed systems integration: REST and gRPC conventions, event-driven architectures, schema design, versioning strategies, and the patterns that make components composable over time
Experience building and leading engineering communities or guilds: the ability to create forums, practices, and culture that cause engineers across autonomous teams to align on shared technical direction
Strong written communication skills, with the ability to produce architectural standards documentation, decision records, and design guidance that engineers actually read and find useful
Demonstrated ability to influence senior technical peers, including principal engineers and staff engineers, through the quality of ideas and reasoning rather than organizational authority

Nice To Haves

Experience designing architectural standards specifically for agentic AI systems: agent-to-agent interfaces, tool use conventions, prompt and response contracts, and the security and observability patterns that apply at agentic boundaries
Background in platform or API product design, where the consumer of your work is another engineering team and the ergonomics of adoption are as important as the correctness of the design
Experience in a formal architecture governance role, such as an enterprise architecture function or a technical standards body, including familiarity with ADR practices and design review processes
Familiarity with identity federation and zero-trust security patterns in distributed systems: how user identity and service identity flow across component boundaries, and the standards that need to be in place to make that flow consistent and auditable
Experience with the practical tooling that operationalizes architectural standards: API contract testing (Pact, Spectral), schema registries, code generation from interface definitions, and linting rules that encode conventions in the development environment
Background in scientific computing, simulation, or engineering-domain software, where the data models and integration patterns have domain-specific constraints that generalist architectural standards must accommodate
Experience building architecture governance and community practices within a decentralized engineering organization, including the forums and alignment mechanisms that maintain coherence across autonomous teams

Responsibilities

Define and maintain Landmark’s architectural standards across the integration surface between components: API design conventions (form, versioning, error semantics, pagination), event and message schema standards, data model conventions, and the deployment and packaging patterns that allow components to be independently developed and assembled.
Establish and operate an Architectural Decision Record (ADR) system that captures significant architectural decisions, the reasoning behind them, and the context that should inform future changes.
Own the design review process for cross-cutting architectural decisions: when a team’s technical choice affects the integration surface, there is a clear, lightweight process for surfacing and aligning on that choice before it becomes a constraint.
Define the architectural standards for agentic AI components as Landmark’s product portfolio incorporates agent-based workflows: agent-to-agent communication patterns, tool interface conventions, prompt and response contracts, and the security and observability patterns that must apply at every agentic boundary.
Build and lead Landmark’s architecture community: a guild of principal and staff engineers from across product and platform teams who collectively own Landmark’s shared architectural direction.
Run the recurring community forums, including design reviews, architecture office hours, and cross-team technical councils, that create the opportunity for alignment before teams diverge.
Establish the practice of cross-team architectural consultation: product teams bring significant design decisions to the community before committing, and they get useful feedback that improves their design rather than a bureaucratic checkpoint.
Build the reference documentation, pattern libraries, and worked examples that make it easy for teams to apply standards correctly without needing to consult you personally on every decision.
Maintain a coherent view of Landmark’s overall system architecture: how the components fit together today and what the target architecture looks like in a world where capabilities can be assembled and disassembled in response to business need.
Identify architectural risks early, including patterns that are diverging, integration surfaces under strain, or emerging technology shifts — such as how agentic AI components interact with each other and with human users — that require proactive standards work before the organization builds on top of them.
Partner with the Director of Product Accelerators to determine what genuinely needs to be implemented as a shared service versus what should be handled in the application layer guided by common engineering standards: favor standards and thin application-layer implementations over centralized shared services wherever composability and team autonomy are better served by that choice.
Partner with the Director of Developer Experience on the tooling and automation that makes architectural standards easy to follow: linting, code generation, API contract testing, and the developer toolchain integrations that encode standards into the development workflow rather than relying solely on documentation and review.
Work alongside principal engineers in each product and platform domain to ensure their team-level architectural decisions are aligned with the shared standards and the broader system direction.
Serve as the architectural voice in CTO-level planning discussions: representing the health of the integration surface and the investment required to maintain it as the organization scales.
Communicate architectural direction clearly to engineering leaders across the organization, including Engineering Managers and Directors who need to understand the constraints and opportunities that architectural standards create for their teams’ roadmaps.