Senior Director, Solution Architecture

The Coca-Cola Company • Atlanta, GA

20h • $217,400 - $245,300 • Onsite

About The Position

Being at the forefront of innovation is exciting, and leading transformation in a large global organization is a role that many people aspire to. If this is you, we have a transformational role in our newly developed platform services organization. We’re looking for a transformational leader in our technology services hub focused on marketing technologies. The Senior Director, Solution Architecture, is the senior technical leader accountable for the overall architecture of Coca-Cola’s global MarTech, AdTech, Customer, and Commercial platforms and products. Functioning as the chief architect for marketing technologies, this leader sets the architecture vision, standards, and patterns, and leads the community of Lead and Platform Architects across these domains, ensuring the technology landscape is coherent, scalable, secure, and built to last across all regions (North America, LATAM, EMEA, APAC). This is a hands-on, lead-by-example role. The right leader has strong foundations in programming and architectural principles, is comfortable getting into the code with engineering teams when it helps, and works shoulder to shoulder with engineers to develop the architectural and coding patterns the organization adopts. The role sets direction through credibility and contribution, not just governance. In Coca-Cola’s networked organization, collaboration is essential. This leader earns influence by working well across teams, listening, and co-creating standards that engineers actually want to use. They are open-minded, curious, and pragmatic, balancing strong technical opinions with the humility to learn from the teams and adapt. A defining priority of this role is to be Generative-AI savvy and forward-looking: defining how AI-native frameworks, autonomous agents, orchestration layers, vector data pipelines, and model governance operate securely and at scale across the global ecosystem, while keeping the architecture practical and cost-aware. The Lead and Platform Architects across MarTech, AdTech, Customer, and Commercial platforms report to this leader, who is accountable for growing them and for the health of the overall architecture. This role reports to the Vice President, Platform & Product Engineering, and partners closely with the Senior Directors across Product Development, Platform, and Operations.

Requirements

• 15+ years of progressive software engineering and architecture experience, including proven success as a Principal / Lead / Chief Architect in a large-scale global ecosystem.
• Strong foundations in programming and architectural principles, with the credibility and willingness to be hands-on and code with engineering teams when needed.
• Deep technical depth across modern stacks (e.g., JavaScript / TypeScript, with Rust or Go familiarity), cloud platforms (AWS / Azure / GCP), enterprise integration patterns, and large-scale platform governance.
• Track record defining standards, reference architectures and patterns that engineering teams actually adopt.
• Generative-AI savvy: hands-on familiarity with LLM integration, agentic and orchestration patterns, RAG/vector pipelines, and AI evaluation and guardrails.
• Expert-level capability in enterprise AI security and governance, including hallucination management, prompt-injection defense and data-poisoning mitigation.
• Familiarity with modern paradigms such as edge compute/WASM and systems-level languages, and a pragmatic view of when to adopt them.
• Demonstrated leadership of globally distributed engineering and architecture communities (in house plus strategic vendors), leading through influence in a networked organization.
• A collaborative, open-minded, lead-by-example style that earns trust, co-creates with teams, and welcomes debate and new ideas.
• Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical topics clearly to engineers and to senior executives, with strong business framing.
• Proven FinOps leadership optimizing large cloud and AI/LLM footprints, and expertise designing privacy-first, Zero-Trust architectures that meet global regulations.
• Bachelor’s degree required. An equivalent combination of relevant education, training, and demonstrated professional experience will also be considered.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field preferred.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the chief architect for the global MarTech, AdTech, Customer, and Commercial ecosystem (owned consumer platforms, Adobe ecosystem, CDP/identity, workflow and delivery tooling, DAM/content supply chain, and key partner integrations).
• Chair and govern the Architecture Review Board, establishing global engineering standards, reference blueprints, technical guardrails, and a sensible exception process that ensures consistency, security, and quality across regions.
• Define and drive the long-term technology roadmap, including how legacy systems deprecate and how modern paradigms are adopted across the ecosystem.
• Provide macro-level oversight to audit, optimize, and resolve major architectural dependencies across the portfolio, removing bottlenecks without micro-managing teams.
• Stay hands-on: work directly with engineering teams on critical designs, prototypes, and proofs of concept, and write code alongside the team when it accelerates a decision or unblocks delivery.
• Co-create the architectural and coding patterns, reference implementations, and “paved roads” that teams adopt, so the right way is also the easy way.
• Review and influence high-risk, high-impact designs (core platforms, identity, data, integrations), making clear, well-reasoned trade-offs among speed, cost, risk, and maintainability.
• Lead by example on engineering craftsmanship, secure coding, and quality, raising the technical bar across the community of architects and engineers.
• Lead, mentor, and grow the community of Lead and Platform Architects across the four domains, aligning them around shared principles while respecting domain context.
• Operate as a collaborative, networked leader: build trust across product, engineering, data, security, and regional teams, and earn adoption of standards through influence and co-creation rather than mandate.
• Create the forums, office hours, and design-guidance practices that make good architecture accessible and that connect architects across the organization.
• Stay open-minded and curious, bringing in outside ideas, encouraging healthy technical debate, and adapting the architecture as the landscape and the teams evolve.
• Define enterprise AI reference architectures (GenAI and agentic): how autonomous agents, orchestration layers, retrieval/vector pipelines, semantic caching, and model governance operate securely across Coca-Cola’s global infrastructure.
• Champion AI-first velocity responsibly, setting standards for LLM integration, evaluation, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop controls, and helping teams move from AI-assisted toward AI-enabled delivery.
• Establish governance for AI security: hallucination management, prompt-injection defense, and data-poisoning mitigation, embedded into the architecture by design.
• Stay current with the fast-moving AI landscape and translate emerging capabilities into practical, scalable architecture decisions.
• Lead FinOps-aligned architecture across cloud and AI workloads, reducing compute overhead, egress, and LLM/token costs through architectural improvements, caching, and disciplined governance, while protecting performance at global scale.
• Ensure privacy, data sovereignty, and Zero-Trust security are embedded by design across platforms, data flows, and partner ecosystems, satisfying global regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA, LGPD) and protecting consumer trust.
• Balance build vs. buy and platform-selection decisions with rigor, avoiding lock-in and unnecessary complexity.
• Act as the primary technical liaison to senior and executive stakeholders, communicating architecture strategy, progress, risks, dependencies, and investment trade-offs with clarity and strong business framing.
• Build strong relationships with agency partners and external vendors, ensuring integrations and delivery models support Coca-Cola’s marketing transformation agenda.
• Influence enterprise technology direction, aligning architecture with product strategy and business priorities.

Benefits

• A full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the position, is offered.

What This Job Offers

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