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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Head of Architecture and Technology

💰 $ - $

ArchitectureTechnology LeadershipEnterprise ITCloud

🎯 Role Definition

The Head of Architecture and Technology is a senior technology leader responsible for defining and executing the enterprise architecture and technology strategy to enable scalable, secure, and cost-effective digital products and platforms. This role drives architecture governance, cloud and platform adoption, cross-functional technical roadmaps, and technical leadership across engineering, data, security, and product organizations. The Head of Architecture and Technology partners with executive leaders to translate business strategy into technical strategy, reduce technical debt, oversee technology selection and vendor relationships, and ensure reliable, observable, and resilient systems that meet performance, compliance, and cost targets.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Enterprise Architect / Principal Architect
  • Director of Technology / Director of Architecture
  • Head of Platform / Head of Cloud Infrastructure

Advancement To:

  • Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
  • Chief Information Officer (CIO)
  • Executive VP of Engineering & Technology

Lateral Moves:

  • Head of Platform Engineering
  • Head of Cloud & Infrastructure
  • Head of Technical Operations / SRE

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Define, own and continuously evolve the enterprise architecture vision, principles, and target state (application, data, cloud, integration, security) that align with business strategy and enable scalable, cost-efficient digital transformation.
  • Lead the design and implementation of cloud architecture strategy (AWS, Azure, GCP), including cloud adoption patterns, landing zones, multi-cloud strategy, cost optimization, and cloud governance to ensure performance, compliance and predictable spend.
  • Establish architecture governance and decision-making processes (architecture review boards, ADRs) to ensure solution compliance with standards, reduce duplication, and enforce non-functional requirements such as security, performance, reliability and observability.
  • Build, mentor and scale a high-performing architecture organization (enterprise, solution, data, security architects), define roles and career paths, and create capability plans to meet current and future product and platform demands.
  • Develop and maintain the technology roadmap and platform strategy (API platform, integration layer, event streaming, microservices, serverless) that supports product roadmaps and accelerates time-to-market.
  • Drive modernization and legacy migration strategies (monolith-to-microservices, replatforming, refactoring) with clear business case, risk assessments, and phased migration plans to reduce technical debt and improve maintainability.
  • Define and enforce secure architecture patterns, threat modeling practices, and collaborate with security and compliance teams to embed security-by-design across all technology initiatives.
  • Own cross-functional architecture reviews for large programs and critical initiatives, providing actionable guidance, trade-off analysis, and acceptance criteria to engineering and product teams.
  • Lead vendor selection, third-party due diligence, procurement, and strategic supplier relationships for infrastructure, platform, middleware and SaaS solutions—ensuring contractual terms support scalability, SLAs and data protection.
  • Oversee platform engineering, CI/CD pipelines, release automation, and developer experience improvements to increase engineering throughput and reliability while minimizing deployment risk.
  • Drive observability, monitoring and incident response strategy (APM, logs, metrics, traces) to improve mean time to detection and resolution and to provide measurable SLAs for business-critical systems.
  • Define data architecture principles, master data management, data integration patterns, and collaborate with data leaders to ensure high-quality, discoverable, secure data products and analytics readiness.
  • Collaborate with product and business stakeholders to translate strategic objectives into architectural solutions, prioritize technical investments, and quantify ROI, TCO and risk for executive decision-making.
  • Lead technical due diligence and integration architecture for mergers, acquisitions, and strategic partnerships—ensuring fast, low-risk integration of systems, data, and teams.
  • Champion API strategy, API lifecycle management and integration standards (REST, GraphQL, gRPC, event-driven integration) to enable partner ecosystems and accelerate internal reuse.
  • Implement cost, capacity and performance planning practices for infrastructure and platforms—working with finance and engineering to forecast spend, rightsizing and optimize resource utilization.
  • Create and publish architecture patterns, reference implementations, libraries and starter kits to accelerate engineering adoption and reduce one-off implementations.
  • Drive initiatives to reduce technical debt through targeted remediation programs, architectural refactors, and metrics-driven prioritization tied to business outcomes.
  • Ensure the architecture organization works closely with SRE, security, data and product teams to establish SLAs, runbooks, disaster recovery plans and business continuity strategies.
  • Set measurable KPIs and metrics for architecture effectiveness (time to market, defect rates, platform adoption, cost per service) and report progress to the executive leadership team.
  • Sponsor and evaluate emerging technologies (AI/ML platforms, edge computing, real-time streaming, serverless) and run proofs-of-concept to validate strategic fit and future competitiveness.
  • Lead communication and change management with engineering, product and business stakeholders to secure buy-in for technology roadmaps, architecture changes and platform migrations.
  • Drive cross-functional initiatives to improve developer productivity (self-service platforms, automated provisioning, documentation) and measure improvements via developer experience KPIs.
  • Maintain an up-to-date architectural risk register, define mitigation strategies, and lead remediation activities to limit exposure to operational, security and compliance risks.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Provide mentorship and architecture coaching to senior engineers and technical leads during solution implementation.
  • Participate in executive and board-level briefings on architecture strategy, investment priorities, and technical risk.
  • Represent the company at industry events, conferences and customer/vendor briefings to position technology strategy and attract talent.
  • Produce architecture artifacts (roadmaps, diagrams, ADRs, standards) and maintain them in a central, discoverable repository for cross-team consumption.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Enterprise architecture frameworks and practices (TOGAF, Zachman, or equivalent) and demonstrated experience translating them into pragmatic, value-driven architectures.
  • Cloud architecture and operations expertise across at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP) with hands-on knowledge of landing zones, networking, IAM, cost management and security controls.
  • Microservices, distributed systems and modular architecture design experience including service decomposition, domain-driven design, and event-driven architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub).
  • Containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, EKS/GKE/AKS) and platform-engineering best practices for running production workloads at scale.
  • Infrastructure as Code and automation (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation) and experience building reproducible, secure infrastructure pipelines.
  • CI/CD and release engineering toolchains (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Spinnaker) and practices for progressive delivery, canary releases and automated rollbacks.
  • API design and management (REST, GraphQL, API gateways, versioning, security) and experience building developer portals and contract-driven development.
  • Observability and monitoring toolchains (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic) plus logging, tracing (OpenTelemetry) and incident management practices.
  • Security architecture and compliance (OAuth, SAML, Zero Trust, encryption, network security), threat modeling and hands-on collaboration with InfoSec and compliance teams (PCI, SOC2, GDPR).
  • Data architecture and integration technologies (ETL/ELT, data lakes, data warehouses, Snowflake/Redshift, CDC tools) and data governance fundamentals.
  • Performance tuning, scalability engineering, and capacity planning for high-throughput, low-latency systems.
  • Experience with modern languages and platforms (Java, Python, Go, Node.js) and database technologies (relational and NoSQL) to evaluate trade-offs.
  • Vendor and SaaS evaluation, contract negotiation and SaaS integration patterns to manage third-party technology ecosystems.
  • Experience with architecture modeling tools, documentation platforms and collaborative design processes (C4 model, UML, Confluence, Miro).

Soft Skills

  • Strategic thinking: ability to convert business strategy into pragmatic architecture roadmaps and investment plans.
  • Executive communication: clear, persuasive presenter able to communicate complex technical trade-offs to non-technical executives and boards.
  • Stakeholder management: build strong cross-functional relationships with product, engineering, security, finance and operations.
  • Leadership and people development: recruit, coach and retain senior technical talent and create high-performing teams.
  • Decision-making under uncertainty: evaluate trade-offs quickly and set direction with incomplete information.
  • Influence and negotiation: secure alignment across competing priorities and obtain resources for strategic initiatives.
  • Change management and facilitation: lead organization-wide adoption of new platforms, patterns and governance.
  • Problem-solving and analytical thinking: use metrics and data to diagnose issues and drive continuous improvement.
  • Collaboration and empathy: work closely with engineering and product teams to remove roadblocks and enable autonomy.
  • Time management and prioritization: balance short-term delivery needs with long-term architectural goals.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or related technical field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree (MS/MA) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Business Administration (MBA) or a related field.
  • Relevant executive or leadership programs and certificates.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology
  • Systems Engineering
  • Data Science

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 12–20+ years in technology roles, with progressive hands-on architecture and engineering experience.

Preferred:

  • 15+ years of experience with at least 5+ years in senior architecture leadership (Head/Director level) responsible for enterprise architecture, cloud strategy, platform engineering and cross-functional technical teams.
  • Proven track record of leading large-scale cloud migrations, platform builds, API and data architecture programs, and delivering measurable business outcomes.

Certifications (recommended): TOGAF, AWS/Azure/GCP Certified Solutions Architect (Professional preferred), Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), relevant security certifications (CISSP, CISM), and architecture/leadership certificates.

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