Principal Platform Architect

D.R. Horton•Arlington, TX

21h

About The Position

D.R. Horton is seeking a Principal Platform Architect to help define the technical foundation for its next generation of data, AI, and digital capabilities. This is a hands-on enterprise architecture role responsible for establishing standards, making consequential technology decisions, building reference patterns, and influencing how modern capabilities are designed and scaled across the company. The architect will connect strategy to implementation, manage complexity, preserve technology optionality, and help engineering teams turn architecture into working platforms. The role owns enterprise-level target architecture and standards. The AI Solution Architect and Integration / API Architect design within those standards at the solution and integration levels. Success means establishing target architecture that engineering teams build to, making technology decisions that preserve optionality, and keeping complexity and cost in check as capabilities scale. Overnight travel is required.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
10+ years of architecture, platform engineering, software engineering, data engineering, cloud, or related experience in enterprise environments.
Demonstrated expertise designing enterprise-scale data, AI, integration, software, and hybrid cloud architectures.
Strong understanding of security, identity, networking, APIs, data platforms, AI/ML platforms, containers, observability, resilience, and FinOps.
Ability to move between executive architecture discussions and detailed technical design with engineers.
Demonstrated ability to work independently, take ownership, communicate clearly, and deliver results in an evolving environment.
Ability to build trusted relationships across the organization while balancing enterprise standards with business needs and operating realities.
Ability to travel overnight.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Azure, Snowflake, the Microsoft ecosystem, NVIDIA, and on-premises or private AI inference (vLLM/NIM, open-weight models), AI gateways, model routing and provider abstraction, MCP (Model Context Protocol), APIs, Kubernetes, open data formats, semantic layers and data contracts, or comparable technologies.
Experience in homebuilding, real estate, construction, mortgage, title, land development, sales, purchasing, finance, customer care, or another distributed operating business.
Experience working in a large enterprise with complex enterprise environments.
Experience founding, incubating, or building new products, capabilities, or businesses from the ground up.

Responsibilities

Define and maintain target-state architecture, reference architectures, technology standards, and reusable patterns across data, AI, software, integration, and hybrid infrastructure.
Lead architecture decisions and tradeoff analyses involving build versus buy or partner, cloud versus on-premises, performance, scalability, security, interoperability, operational complexity, vendor lock-in, and total cost of ownership.
Chair or lead architecture reviews for major priority products, platform changes, integrations, and technology selections.
Translate enterprise strategy into implementable architecture and work hands-on with engineering teams to ensure designs become production standards.
Partner with Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Data, AI, Software, Governance, and business teams on cross-cutting architecture decisions.
Represent the function in cross-functional discovery, architecture, governance, operational-readiness, and continuous-improvement activities as appropriate.
Stay current on relevant data, AI, digital, software, and industry practices, applying new capabilities when they create practical business value.
Identify, shape, and pilot opportunities where data, AI, and digital capabilities can create business value, with an owner's mindset and a bias toward building, testing, and learning quickly.
Conduct all business in a professional and ethical manner.