What are the responsibilities and job description for the Executive Director - Solutions Architect - Infrastructure position at Request Technology, LLC?
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Director - Platform Architecture (Hands on)
- Looking for a hands- on Director. You will need to have come up through infrastructure and then got into architecture. You will be managing 3-5 people. You will be actively doing the architecture (not just managing the architects). Solution architect in platform observerability etc. Strong Kubernetes, DevOps, Containerization, on-prem and cloud, Kafka, and Flink *Industry & Financial experience would be a plus. Not just a manager, but someone who can roll up their sleeves. Minimum 3 5 years managing high-level talent
- Technical familiarity with AWS, Kafka, Flink, and hybrid cloud/on-prem environments
SALARY: $250k - $270k plus 30% bonus
LOCATION: Chicago, IL
Hybrid 3 days onsite and 2 days remote
Owning the technical strategy and standards for all infrastructure domains cloud, onpremises, networking, compute, storage, and observability. This is a people leadership role responsible for developing a team of principal architects and ensuring their work produces coherent, enterprise-wide platform standards rather than isolated domain expertise.
Qualifications:
- 12 years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or systems architecture
- 3 years in a people management
- 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, networking, compute, storage, and container platforms
- Deep experience with AWS architecture
- Strong working knowledge of Kubernetes
- 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
Technical Skills
- Cloud: AWS foundational and advanced services EC2,
- EKS, MSK, S3, VPC, IAM, KMS, Direct Connect, Transit Gateway, CloudWatch
- Container platforms: Kubernetes (EKS or self-managed),
- Docker, Helm, container networking (CNI)
- Streaming and processing: Apache Kafka, Apache Flink
- GitOps and IaC: Terraform, ArgoCD, Flux, Helm, GitHub Actions or Jenkins
- Networking: routing protocols, firewalling, load balancing,
- DNS, hybrid connectivity, network security zoning
- Storage: block, object, and file storage architecture; backup and recovery patterns
- Observability: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or equivalent
- Unix/Linux environments; artifact management (Nexus, Artifactory)
Salary : $250,000 - $270,000