Principal Architect, Platform Architecture - FreeWheel

Serve as a senior architecture partner to Platform Engineering and Engineering teams, providing guidance on platform and infrastructure technology decisions.

Develop Platform Architecture Roadmaps, Reference Architectures, standards, and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) supporting FreeWheel’s engineering ecosystem.

Guide architectural direction for cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platforms, serverless technologies, databases, networking, observability, CI/CD, developer tooling, secrets management, and shared engineering services.

Partner with Platform Engineering on the design and evolution of platform capabilities, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, reliable, operable, and cost-efficient.

Define platform guardrails, paved roads, reusable patterns, and golden paths that improve developer productivity and reduce unnecessary technology variation.

Apply FinOps principles to architecture decisions by analyzing current cloud and other vended technology costs, correlating Engineering spend with services and architectural patterns, assessing utilization efficiency, and identifying material cost drivers.

Evaluate architecture and platform alternatives in terms of technical fit, operational impact, and expected effect on FreeWheel’s total cost of ownership.

Evaluate build, buy, extend, customize, and deprecate options for infrastructure and platform technologies.

Lead architecture reviews and provide design guidance for major platform initiatives and modernization efforts.

Develop strategies and guidelines related to cloud governance, platform standardization, technology lifecycle management, infrastructure modernization, and systems deprecation.

Shape multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud architecture approaches, workload placement guidance, and migration strategies.

Define architecture patterns for observability, resilience, secrets management, identity integration, platform APIs, automation, and operational excellence.

Help shape the strategy, toolsets, and standard practices for utilizing AI and automation within engineering workflows, developer experience, platform operations, and architecture practices.

Operate as an engineering-focused architect who balances platform standardization with product-team flexibility.

Raise the bar on platform thinking through reusable services, shared capabilities, paved roads, and golden paths.

Lead technical design discussions and architecture reviews; drive clarity through ADRs, reference architectures, standards, and migration plans.

Balance near-term engineering needs with long-term modernization and platform sustainability.

Guide teams through complex technology decisions by making tradeoffs explicit and recommendations actionable.

Connect technology decisions to financial outcomes by helping teams understand how architecture choices, platform adoption, cloud consumption, and service efficiency affect total cost of ownership.

Contribute to measurable improvements in reliability, scalability, security, developer productivity, and cost efficiency.

Mentor architects and engineers while contributing to the continued maturity of the Enterprise Architecture practice.

Respect and promote inclusion and diversity.

10+ years in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, cloud architecture, or enterprise architecture roles.

Deep experience with Kubernetes, cloud-native architecture, CI/CD, observability, databases, networking, infrastructure automation, and security-by-design.

Experience designing and evolving large-scale cloud, hybrid-cloud, or datacenter-based platforms.

Strong understanding of resiliency engineering, SLOs, observability, platform security, identity, and secrets management.

Experience evaluating build-versus-buy decisions and creating architecture roadmaps, standards, and reference architectures.

Experience applying FinOps principles to architecture and platform strategy, including cloud cost analysis, service utilization assessment, workload optimization, technology cost modeling, and total cost of ownership analysis.

Demonstrated ability to correlate cloud spending with services, architectural patterns, and platform usage; identify inefficiencies; and evaluate alternatives based on their impact to cost structure.

Ability to communicate effectively with engineers, architects, engineering managers, and senior technology leaders.

Experience leading architecture reviews and turning ambiguous technical challenges into clear recommendations and execution plans.

Experience in large-scale distributed environments such as AdTech, FinTech, Telecom, media technology, SaaS, or marketplace platforms.

Bonus: Experience with platform engineering, internal developer platforms, AI-enabled engineering tooling, or developer productivity initiatives.

Understand our Operating Principles; make them the guidelines for how you do your job.

Own the customer experience - think and act in ways that put our customers first, give them seamless digital options at every touchpoint, and make them promoters of our products and services.

Know your stuff - be enthusiastic learners, users and advocates of our game-changing technology, products and services, especially our digital tools and experiences.

Win as a team - make big things happen by working together and being open to new ideas.

Be an active part of the Net Promoter System - a way of working that brings more employee and customer feedback into the company - by joining huddles, making call backs and helping us elevate opportunities to do better for our customers.

Drive results and growth.

Respect and promote inclusion & diversity.

Do what's right for each other, our customers, investors and our communities.

Disclaimer: This information has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees in this role. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities and qualifications.