Principal Enterprise Architect

IHG•Atlanta, GA

7d•$184,000 - $205,000

About The Position

Enterprise Architecture serves as the foremost technical authority and strategic leader for the company’s AI discipline. The Principal Enterprise Architect combines deep technical expertise with the ability to influence and guide the organization’s technical direction, taking on complex, ambiguous, and high-impact challenges. The role operates across teams and business units to set a long-term vision for AI architecture, platforms, and practices, leading AI and cloud architectures toward a cloud-native, AI-enabled data and API ecosystem. The architect defines pragmatic reference architectures, patterns, and guardrails that accelerate delivery and make architecture an enablement function. The role designs and prototypes foundational AI platforms, frameworks, and services used across the organization, while leading legacy data-platform modernization, cloud data-platform architecture, data engineering enablement, and AI-driven data modernization. It also embeds security, privacy, risk, and regulatory needs into architecture patterns and CI/CD practices, and influences senior stakeholders across business, product, engineering, security, and governance to drive modernization outcomes.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or master’s degree in a relevant field, or an equivalent combination of education and work-related experience.
Seven to ten years of architecture, design, or delivery experience, including five years of enterprise architecture experience; alternatively, seven to ten years of solution architecture experience in technology and security. Requires five years in the Hospitality/Retail business domain.
Comprehensive experience across architectural domains such as application, data, infrastructure, security, and integration.
Strong analytical, problem-solving, and broad architectural skills.
Strong verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical issues to technical audiences, clients, vendors, senior management, and staff.
Strong negotiation and facilitation skills, including experience negotiating with vendors for relevant products and services.
Significant knowledge of current and emerging architecture principles, methodologies, and tools.
Demonstrated strategic thinking and ability to distinguish feasible solutions from academic ones.
Demonstrated thought leadership and ability to translate high-level business planning information into application needs and solutions.
Experience working with geographically dispersed teams and providing a holistic view of development projects.
Extensive software engineering and AI experience, with a proven record operating at a Principal or equivalent level, such as Senior/Lead Staff Engineer or Architect.
Experience setting technical vision for multiple teams or an entire enterprise and recognition as a technical leader.
Verifiable experience architecting and building large-scale, mission-critical AI systems that delivered significant business impact.
Deep experience navigating ambiguity and translating high-level business or product strategy into a concrete, multi-year technical roadmap.
Experience presenting to and influencing executive leaders, including VPs, CTOs, and CPOs, on complex technical topics.
Expert understanding of modern AI concepts, including large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic workflows.
Expert experience with a major cloud provider—GCP, AWS, or Azure—including its AI/ML services.
Familiarity with MLOps principles and tools for CI/CD, model deployment, and monitoring.
Solid understanding of microservices architecture, API design such as REST and gRPC, and containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
Ability to design highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems and architect effectively for cloud environments.
Ability to establish and maintain customer trust and confidence in the software engineering team’s understanding of customer business needs.
Understanding and effective use of agile best practices.

Nice To Haves

Proven ability to reason about and architect solutions using the Google Gemini family of models and its underlying infrastructure.
Contributions to open-source projects, publications in reputable conferences, or speaking at technical events.

Responsibilities

Define and drive long-term enterprise architecture technical roadmaps for AI, identifying and championing technological paradigms that create significant opportunities and sustainable competitive advantages.
Design and prototype foundational AI platforms, frameworks, and core services for use across the organization, setting standards for scalability, security, and innovation.
Lead modernization of legacy data platforms into cloud-native architecture, including migration strategies, transitional architectures, and decommissioning roadmaps.
Architect enterprise cloud data warehouse and lakehouse solutions, including workload placement, cost and performance optimization, and resilience patterns.
Establish patterns for batch and streaming data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability; partner with engineering teams to improve delivery quality and velocity.
Apply AI concepts to modernize data engineering and delivery, including intelligent metadata, automated lineage, code assistance, testing and validation automation, anomaly detection, and policy enforcement.
Define architecture guardrails, reference implementations, reusable templates, and paved roads that teams can adopt with minimal friction.
Embed security, privacy, risk, and regulatory requirements into architecture patterns and CI/CD practices to enable continuous compliance.
Influence senior stakeholders across business, product, engineering, security, and governance to align priorities, resolve tradeoffs, and drive measurable modernization outcomes.
Translate high-level business and product strategy into technical direction, application needs, and multi-year roadmaps.
Present and influence executive leadership on complex technical topics.
Work effectively with geographically dispersed teams and bring a holistic view to development projects.