Program Architect

Job Title: Program Architect - Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS)

Job Type: 6 months

Job Location: Dallas, TX (3days hybrid onsite)

Job Description:-

Program Architect

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.