Senior System Architect

Marathon Petroleum Corporation•Findlay, OH

5d•Onsite

About The Position

The Senior System Architect is a strategic technical leadership role responsible for designing, improving, and sustaining complex cybersecurity, hybrid cloud, operational technology, and infrastructure platforms that support critical business operations. This position collaborates on long-term technical direction, practical architecture roadmaps, and ensures supported systems are secure, resilient, scalable, and aligned with enterprise technology and business objectives. This role partners closely with cybersecurity, cloud operations, infrastructure, application, engineering, audit, operational technology, managed service providers, and business stakeholders to ensure operational services are reliable, supportable, and secure. Responsibilities include evaluating current-state capabilities, identifying opportunities for improvement, strengthening system architecture, improving configuration and lifecycle management practices, and helping ensure technology environments operate in a manner that reduces risk and supports safe, reliable business operations. The Senior System Architect is expected to work independently on complex, high-impact initiatives that require advanced technical expertise, sound judgment, and strong problem-solving skills. This includes evaluating emerging technologies, developing standards and procedures, improving automation opportunities, supporting audit and compliance readiness, enhancing monitoring and observability capabilities, and driving continuous improvement across enterprise security and infrastructure platforms. As a senior technical contributor, this position provides guidance, mentorship, and escalation support to engineers, analysts, managed service partners, and cross-functional teams. The role helps establish clear expectations for system ownership, documentation, incident response readiness, configuration management, operational support, and sustainable technology delivery. Success in this position requires strong communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences. The ideal candidate will bring a strong blend of architecture experience, operational discipline, security awareness, and leadership through influence. This role is well suited for a technology professional who can assess complex environments, recommend practical solutions, drive improvements across teams, and help strengthen the reliability, security, compliance, and performance of enterprise technology services. This position belongs to a family of jobs with increasing responsibility, competency, and skill level. Actual position title and pay grade will be based on the selected candidate’s experience and qualifications.

Requirements

Bachelor’s Degree in Information Technology, related field or equivalent experience required.
Five (5) or more years of relevant IT experience, including two (2) or more years of relevant architecture experience required.
Required experience collaborating with cross-functional technical teams, business stakeholders, and managed service providers to resolve complex issues, improve system reliability, and deliver secure, scalable technology solutions.

Nice To Haves

Preferred experience supporting architecture, design, implementation, or operational improvement efforts for enterprise technology platforms, including cloud, infrastructure, cybersecurity, application, or hybrid environments.
Preferred certifications include cloud, infrastructure, security, and architecture credentials such as Microsoft Azure Administrator, AWS Solutions Architect, CompTIA Security+/Network+, ITIL 4 Foundation, DevSecOps Foundation, TOGAF Foundation, and ArchiMate Foundation.
Additional highly preferred certifications include Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS), CCSP, CISSP, CISM, CRISC, CISA, Cisco CCNP (Enterprise/Security), VMware Certified Professional (VCP), and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Foundation.
Adaptability - Maintaining effectiveness when experiencing major changes in work responsibilities or environment (e.g., people, processes, structure, or culture); adjusting effectively to change by exploring the benefits, trying new approaches, and collaborating with others to make the change successful.
AI Fundamentals - Understanding of core AI concepts and methods, ability to apply AI to job-relevant use cases and capacity to contribute to organizational AI reimagination.
Change Management - Change Management refers to a systematic approach for defining and implementing procedures and/or technologies to deal with changes in the environment. It can mean adapting to change, controlling change and/or effecting change.
Agile Methodology - Agile project management is an iterative approach to delivering a project throughout its life cycle, taking incremental steps towards the completion of a project.
Architecture Frameworks - Proficiency in widely used architecture frameworks like TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) or Zachman Framework to structure and organize architectural artifacts and processes.
Authentic Communicator - Expresses ideas and information, both verbally and in writing, clearly and credibly. Listens to understand and fosters constructive dialogue.
Business Acumen - Applies knowledge of MPC’s business, industry and the marketplace to advance the organization’s goals. Makes decisions and recommendations clearly linked to MPC’s strategy.
Cloud Computing - Knowing how to manage cloud services, develop cloud applications and use cloud architecture to meet customer needs.
Continuous Improvement Mindset - Identifies and leads opportunities for continuous improvement and value creation, both incremental and large-scale.
DevSecOps - A set of practices that automates the integration of security at every phase of the software development lifecycle, from initial design through integration, testing, deployment, and software delivery, with an aim towards shortening the systems development life cycle and pas well as continuous delivery and a security first approach.
Edge Computing - Edge computing refers to the decentralized processing of data near the source of data generation, reducing latency and bandwidth usage by performing computations closer to the devices or sensors producing the data. This approach aims to enhance efficiency, responsiveness, and real-time capabilities in computing systems by distributing computing tasks to the "edge" of the network, rather than relying solely on centralized cloud servers.
Functional Expertise - A strong understanding of various technologies, platforms, and systems relevant to the organization's architecture, such as networking, databases, cloud computing, and security.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) - The process of managing and provisioning infrastructure through code instead of through manual processes.
Internet of Things (IoT) - Familiarity with IoT concepts and protocols, as well as experience designing architectures that incorporate IoT devices and enable seamless connectivity and data exchange.
Performance Monitoring - The process of measuring the performance of a system in real time in order to determine problems and identify other factors that may cause problems in the future.
Process Orchestration - Process orchestration refers to the coordination and management of various tasks, activities, and resources within a workflow or business process. It involves organizing, sequencing, and automating individual tasks or sub-processes to ensure that the overall process operates smoothly and efficiently. Process orchestration typically involves integrating disparate systems, applications, and services to streamline operations and improve collaboration across different parts of an organization. It often employs workflow management tools, automation software, and integration platforms to facilitate communication, data exchange, and decision-making among different components of the process. The goal of process orchestration is to optimize the flow of work, minimize delays and bottlenecks and enhance overall productivity and performance.
Strategic Outlook - Examines issues, generates ideas, creates future scenarios and develops plans with a long-term perspective. Ensures short-term goals support long-term strategy and that organizational/functional strategy aligns with and supports MPC’s overall business strategy.
System Reliability - Reliability refers to the ability of a system or component to consistently perform its intended function without failure, errors, or breakdowns. High availability, on the other hand, denotes the design and implementation of systems to ensure continuous operation and accessibility, minimizing downtime and ensuring users can access services whenever needed.
Systems Design - The process of designing technical solutions and systems to meet specified business and user requirements that are compatible with established system architectures, as well as organizational and performance standards.

Responsibilities

Define and drive technical strategy, architecture roadmaps, system design, advanced configuration, and integration for complex enterprise systems across applicable architecture domains, including application, technology, information, and security architecture.
Lead the evaluation and adoption of emerging technologies that improve system architecture, strengthen platform capabilities, support modernization, and enhance secure, scalable, and resilient business operations.
Oversee system performance, scalability, reliability, security, lifecycle management, and operational readiness to ensure platforms meet business, operational, and compliance requirements.
Provide deep technical expertise, mentorship, and guidance to implementation teams, including DevSecOps, product, hybrid cloud, infrastructure, engineering, and managed service teams.
Serve as a senior escalation point for the most complex technical issues, leading analysis, troubleshooting, and resolution of critical system challenges that impact enterprise technology services.
Ensure system architecture aligns with enterprise technical standards, security expectations, integration patterns, compliance requirements, and operational best practices.