Executive Director, Platform Architecture & Cloud Strategy

National Black MBA Association; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 198,000 - 347,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work environment

Tuition Reimbursement

Student Loan Repayment Assistance

Technology Stipend

Generous PTO and Parental leave

401k Employer Match

Health benefits

Job summary

The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) seeks an Executive Director, Platform Architecture to lead the Platform Architecture team and define enterprise-wide infrastructure standards across cloud, on-premises, networking, compute, storage, and observability.

You will drive cloud adoption, GitOps, and resilient platform patterns, partnering with Engineering, Security, and Operations to meet regulatory obligations and drive technology transformation initiatives.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or systems architecture, with at least 3 years in a people leadership or team lead role
• Demonstrated experience defining and governing infrastructure architecture standards across multiple domains at organizational scale
• Broad, hands-on knowledge across infrastructure domains: cloud (AWS), on-premises data center, hybrid connectivity, networking, compute, storage, and container platforms
• Deep experience with AWS architecture — VPCs, EC2, EKS, MSK, S3, IAM, KMS, Direct Connect, Transit Gateway, and security services
• Strong working knowledge of Kubernetes — cluster architecture, workload design, multi-tenancy, networking (CNI), and operational patterns at scale
• Experience with Apache Kafka as enterprise streaming infrastructure — deployment, operations, and topology design
• Demonstrated experience leading GitOps and infrastructure-as-code programs — Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, Flux, or equivalent
• Experience with hybrid and on-premises/cloud connectivity architecture — network design, routing,firewalling, and security zoning
• Ability to lead through influence and authority — building alignment across Engineering, Security, Operations, and Governance
• Strong communication skills — able to represent infrastructure strategy to executive leadership and translate architecture decisions into actionable standards for engineering teams

Responsibilities

• Lead, develop, and set direction for a team of principal architects covering cloud, on-premises infrastructure, networking, compute, storage, and observability domains
• Own the Platform Architecture vision: deliver the resilient, scalable foundation upon which critical market functions depend — making resilience the default, not the exception
• Ensure individual architect domain expertise is synthesized into coherent, enterprise-wide platform standards — not siloed recommendations
• Manage team priorities, capacity, and delivery against architecture commitments across programs and initiatives Develop team members through coaching, feedback, and exposure to enterprise-scale architectural challenges
• Establish and maintain authoritative platform architecture standards spanning cloud (AWS), on-premises data center, hybrid connectivity, networking, compute, storage, and container platforms
• Define reference architectures and infrastructure patterns that Engineering and application teams can consume without requiring per-project architecture engagement Own non-functional requirements standards at the platform level — availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, latency, throughput, and capacity — as first-class concerns applicable across all tiers of OCC's system portfolio
• Enforce platform standards through Architecture Review Board participation and design review processes
• Maintain infrastructure architecture documentation, ADRs, and transition plans that accurately reflect current and target state
• Own OCC's infrastructure architecture strategy for cloud adoption — defining what moves to AWS, what remains on-premises, and how hybrid connectivity is structured
• Ensure cloud architecture patterns for networking, security, identity, and compute are consistent, compliant, and operationally sound across all workloads Drive GitOps and infrastructure-as-code adoption — pipeline standards, environment promotion, configuration management, and secrets management at enterprise scale
• Lead architecture direction for container platform (Kubernetes/EKS), streaming infrastructure (Kafka), and stream processing (Flink) as foundational platform capabilities
• Identify and systematically reduce infrastructure risk — single points of failure, end-of-life dependencies, capacity constraints, and gaps in recovery capabilities
• Partner Across the Organization
• Serve as the primary platform architecture partner to Application Architecture, ensuring application designs are grounded in platform reality and platform capabilities evolve to meet application needs
• Collaborate with Engineering, Security, and Operations to ensure platform architecture decisions are implementable, operable, and aligned to security requirements
• Engage with Technology Leads, program management, and senior leadership to represent platform architecture in strategic planning, budgeting, and vendor decisions
• Coordinate with Governance/Risk and Compliance to ensure platform architecture satisfies OCC's regulatory obligations under Regulation SCI and CPMI-IOSCO resilience principles
• Ensure Operational Resilience
• Establish observability standards — metrics, logging, distributed tracing, and alerting — as platform-level capabilities delivered to all application teams
• Define and govern disaster recovery, business continuity, and resilience architecture across infrastructure domains
• Drive capacity planning and performance engineering practices; ensure the platform is sized and architected ahead of demand, not reactive to it
• Lead platform architecture participation in incident postmortems; ensure operational findings drive durable infrastructure improvements
• Supervisory Responsibilities
• Manages a team of principal architects and senior individual contributors across infrastructure architecture domains

Skills

Cloud architecture

AWS knowledge

Kubernetes

GitOps

Infra architecture

Leadership

Platform strategy

Education

BS degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Terraform

Helm

ArgoCD

Flux

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Job description

The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) seeks an Executive Director, Platform Architecture to lead the Platform Architecture team and define enterprise-wide infrastructure standards across cloud, on-premises, networking, compute, storage, and observability.

You will drive cloud adoption, GitOps, and resilient platform patterns, partnering with Engineering, Security, and Operations to meet regulatory obligations and drive technology transformation initiatives.