Program Architect

Role Summary

The Program Architect is responsible for architectural leadership and coordination across large, complex enterprise programs spanning multiple projects, systems, and delivery teams. The role bridges enterprise architectural strategy and program execution, ensuring architectural cohesion, disciplined governance, and successful delivery at scale.

The Program Architect operates as the architectural owner for a program, orchestrating solution-level architects across organizational boundaries while enabling Enterprise Architects to focus on enterprise-wide strategy and standards.

This role is accountable for ensuring architecture decisions are aligned, intentional, and executable—without becoming a bottleneck to delivery.

Key Responsibilities

Program-Level Architecture Ownership

• Own the end-to-end architecture for an assigned program, including target state, transition states, and integration strategy.
• Ensure architectural consistency across all projects and workstreams within the program.
• Act as the architectural escalation point for cross-solution conflicts, tradeoffs, and risks.

Enterprise Alignment & Governance

• Partner closely with Enterprise Architects to translate enterprise strategy, principles, and standards into program-level architectural direction.
• Ensure program designs comply with enterprise architecture, security, reliability, and regulatory standards.
• Lead program-level architecture reviews and manage required governance artifacts and approvals.

Architect Team Leadership & Coordination

• Lead and coordinate a blended team of architects (AAR Solution Architects and architects from other organizational units).
• Provide direction, guardrails, and decision clarity to Solution Architects without micromanaging design execution.
• Facilitate collaboration and alignment across architect teams to prevent fragmentation and duplication.

Integration & Dependency Management

• Own the cross-system integration strategy, including interfaces, data flows, and shared services.
• Identify and manage architectural dependencies across projects, platforms, and external programs.
• Proactively surface and mitigate architectural risks that could impact program delivery or enterprise outcomes.

Program Leadership Partnership

• Serve as a trusted technical partner to program leadership.
• Ensure architectural decisions support program objectives, delivery timelines, and business outcomes.
• Communicate architectural status, risks, and tradeoffs in a clear, decision-oriented manner.

Delivery & Execution Support

• Remain engaged throughout delivery—not just during design phases.
• Support Solution Architects and delivery teams during implementation to resolve architectural questions and issues.
• Ensure designs are operable, supportable, and production-ready.

Operational Readiness & Lifecycle Ownership

• Ensure architectural designs account for reliability, scalability, security, observability, and supportability.
• Coordinate architectural aspects of operational readiness and production deployment.
• Capture lessons learned and contribute back to enterprise patterns and standards.

Required Qualifications

Experience

• 8–10 years of experience in architecture, engineering, or senior technical leadership roles.
• Proven experience leading architecture for large-scale, multi-project enterprise programs.
• Prior Solution Architect or Lead Architect experience with direct delivery accountability.

Technical Breadth

• Strong understanding of:
• Distributed and integrated systems
• Application and data architecture
• Cloud and/or hybrid environments
• Security-by-design and non-functional requirements
• Ability to reason across application, platform, infrastructure, and operations domains.

Leadership & Influence

• Demonstrated ability to lead without direct authority.
• Comfortable making and defending architectural decisions under ambiguity.
• Able to challenge teams, stakeholders, and vendors constructively when required.

Communication & Stakeholder Management

• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to clearly articulate architecture to:
• Executives and program leadership (outcomes, risks, tradeoffs)
• Technical teams (design intent, constraints, patterns)
• Produces pragmatic, decision-focused artifacts—not academic documentation.

Program Overview

The Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS) program is focused on the implementation and integration of a modern grid operations platform that unifies outage management (OMS), distribution management (DMS), and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) capabilities into a cohesive, real-time operational ecosystem. Experience with AspenTech OSI Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS) is preferred.

The program spans grid monitoring, control, outage response, network modeling, and operational analytics to support safe, reliable, and efficient electric distribution operations.

Key systems and domains in scope include ADMS platform capabilities, integrations with GIS, AMI, DERMS, EMS, and enterprise operational systems, as well as real-time data ingestion, control room tooling, and field communications.

The ADMS program is a cornerstone initiative in enabling grid modernization, improving situational awareness, reducing outage duration, and supporting distributed energy resource (DER) integration at scale.

Program Architect Focus

The Program Architect ensures that the ADMS platform is implemented as an integrated, resilient, and scalable grid operations capability—rather than a collection of loosely coupled operational tools.

Key areas of responsibility include:

• Defining the end-to-end program architecture across ADMS components including OMS, DMS, SCADA integrations, and real-time data processing layers.
• Ensuring seamless integration with upstream and downstream systems such as GIS, AMI, DERMS, EMS, asset management, customer systems and other edge systems.
• Establishing architectural guardrails for vendor platforms and system integrators to minimize over-customization and ensure long-term maintainability.
• Designing for high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery to support mission-critical grid operations.
• Coordinating data architecture for real-time and near-real-time telemetry, network models, and operational analytics.
• Ensuring consistent system-of-record definitions and data synchronization strategies across operational systems.
• Driving alignment between control room operations, field systems, and enterprise platforms through well-defined integration patterns and interfaces.
• Supporting scalability to accommodate increasing grid complexity, DER penetration, and advanced automation use cases.
• Advising on long-term architectural strategy for phased ADMS rollout, including legacy system decommissioning and transition states.
• Ensuring cybersecurity considerations are embedded in architecture, particularly for operational technology (OT) and IT/OT boundary integrations.

This role is critical to preventing fragmented grid operations, ensuring system reliability, and enabling advanced capabilities such as automated switching, predictive outage management, and DER orchestration.