Senior Director of AdTech Architecture – FreeWheel

Comcast • Chicago, NY

3d

About The Position

FreeWheel, a Comcast company, provides advertising technology platforms for publishers, advertisers, and media buyers. The Enterprise Architecture team works with Product Management and Engineering to turn business strategy, market opportunities, product roadmaps, and technology constraints into scalable product architectures and engineering roadmaps.

The Senior Director, Enterprise Architecture is the senior leader responsible for building and leading a team of Enterprise Architects supporting FreeWheel’s product portfolio and providing technical direction to Engineering. This role combines people leadership, portfolio-level architecture leadership, and organizational influence. The leader shapes architecture strategy for FreeWheel’s AdTech platforms, establishes governance and standards, guides investment decisions, and aligns teams on pragmatic, scalable, secure, and cost-efficient technology choices. The role also modernizes the architecture practice, improves solution quality across the portfolio, and builds partnerships with Product, Engineering, Operations, Security, Data, and client-facing stakeholders.

The position leads architecture for distributed, cloud-native systems across areas such as ad serving, SSP, DSP, audience and identity, measurement, revenue science, APIs, and data platforms. It sets architecture direction and governance, develops portfolio roadmaps, advises on technology investments, and promotes modernization, reuse, reliability, security, and cost efficiency. The role also explores generative and agentic AI opportunities and establishes appropriate guardrails for their use.

The leader represents Enterprise Architecture in senior leadership and cross-functional planning, coaches architects and senior technical leaders, and builds a collaborative, high-performing architecture community. The role calls for sound independent judgment and discretion in significant matters, along with regular, consistent, and punctual attendance. Other duties and responsibilities may be assigned.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 12 or more years of experience in software engineering, software architecture, or enterprise architecture, including significant architecture leadership for distributed, high-scale platforms.
• 10 or more years of people leadership experience managing senior architects, principal engineers, or comparable senior technical individual contributors.
• Experience partnering with Product Management and Engineering leadership to define architecture strategy, roadmaps, and execution plans for complex product portfolios.
• Strong knowledge of cloud-native architecture, including microservices, Kubernetes, APIs, event-driven systems, resiliency patterns, observability, and security-by-design.
• Demonstrated ability to lead architecture for complex, data-intensive and transaction-oriented systems with demanding performance, availability, and scale requirements.
• Experience establishing architecture governance, decision frameworks, standards, and review processes across multiple teams.
• Strong understanding of security, privacy, identity, integration, and data architecture patterns for large-scale enterprise and product environments.
• Ability to evaluate build, buy, customize, and deprecate tradeoffs and communicate technical decisions to executive, product, and engineering audiences.
• Excellent leadership, communication, conflict-resolution, and organizational-influencing skills.
• Relevant work experience of 10 years or more, as stated in the posting.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in AdTech, MarTech, media technology, or adjacent digital advertising ecosystems, including familiarity with ad serving, programmatic supply and demand, identity, measurement, or monetization workflows.
• Experience with premium video, CTV, SSAI, live event monetization, or marketplace platforms.
• Experience supporting global product organizations with multiple engineering teams and complex stakeholder environments.
• Hands-on familiarity with generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), workflow orchestration, agentic AI, and governance for production AI systems.
• Experience modernizing legacy systems into more modular, platform-oriented, API-first, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with FinOps, cost-aware architecture, and engineering practices that improve operational efficiency and cloud-spend discipline.
• Bachelor’s degree; the posting notes that equivalent coursework and experience or extensive related professional experience may also be considered.

Responsibilities

• Lead, develop, and manage Enterprise Architects aligned to Product domains and partnered with Engineering teams across FreeWheel’s AdTech platforms.
• Define and drive the Enterprise Architecture vision, operating model, and engagement approach for Product-facing architecture work.
• Advise Product Management and Engineering leadership, translating market opportunities, portfolio priorities, and client requirements into architecture direction and investment recommendations.
• Oversee solution blueprints, reference architectures, architecture decision records, roadmaps, and target-state designs.
• Establish and run architecture governance, including design reviews, decision forums, standards management, exception handling, and lifecycle oversight.
• Guide architecture for distributed, cloud-native systems spanning ad serving, SSP, DSP, audience and identity, measurement, revenue science, APIs, and data platforms.
• Balance delivery speed with maintainability, operability, resiliency, privacy, security, interoperability, and cost efficiency.
• Partner with Infrastructure & Platform Architecture to align products with technical direction on modernization, domain boundaries, integration patterns, event-driven architecture, data contracts, and shared platform capabilities.
• Shape portfolio roadmaps to reduce technical debt, rationalize legacy patterns, and develop reusable platforms, paved roads, and golden paths.
• Influence build, buy, extend, customize, and retire decisions by assessing business value, complexity, architectural fit, risk, and total cost of ownership.
• Identify opportunities to apply generative AI and agentic AI across product and internal workflows, and establish governance, privacy, security, evaluation, and human-oversight guardrails.
• Drive measurable improvements in architecture maturity, engineering effectiveness, software quality, system reliability, scalability, security posture, and cost transparency.
• Represent Enterprise Architecture in senior leadership forums and cross-functional planning; contribute to strategic planning, portfolio prioritization, and major initiative reviews.
• Build partnerships across Product, Commercial, Engineering, Security, Data, Platform, Operations, and client-facing teams.
• Coach and mentor architects and senior technical leaders, develop talent, improve architectural rigor, and foster a collaborative architecture community.
• Exercise independent judgment and discretion in matters of significance, maintain regular and punctual attendance, and perform other assigned duties.
• Build an engaged, high-performing team with clear priorities, accountability, and development plans.
• Frame architecture choices in terms of customer value, market differentiation, technical risk, and time-to-impact to create clarity for Product and Engineering.
• Promote reuse, standardization, and platform leverage while enabling innovation and near-term delivery.
• Enable healthy technical debate, drive decisions to closure, and ensure architecture guidance is documented, shared, and actionable.
• Foster inclusion, learning, continuous improvement, and sound judgment across the architecture practice and broader Engineering organization.

Benefits

• Bonus eligibility for most non-sales positions.
• Comprehensive benefits options intended to support employees physically, financially, and emotionally; specific benefits are not enumerated in the posting.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior