Manager IT Architecture - Enterprise & Cloud

Position Summary

The Manager IT Architecture (Enterprise & Cloud) will stand up Architecture Office from greenfield; establishing the operating model, standards, and team needed to govern enterprise and Microsoft Azure architecture. This leader manages a small team and partners closely with Operations, Service Delivery/PMO, and GRC to ensure designs meet non‑functional requirements for availability, performance, recoverability (RTO/RPO), and scalability. The ideal candidate blends deep Azure and hybrid networking experience with an enterprise mindset, strong stakeholder communication, and a bias toward pragmatic, reusable patterns.

Essential Position Duties

• Stand up the Architecture Office from greenfield: define mission, scope, engagement model, and success metrics; establish design intake, review gates, and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
• Recruit, lead, and coach a high‑performing team of up to 2 architects; set objectives, mentoring plans, and career paths.
• Own the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) program from greenfield: define the data model and critical CIs/services, quality thresholds, discovery and service‑mapping approach, and post‑change update processes; integrate CMDB with change, incident, and problem management.
• Publish and maintain enterprise and platform roadmaps (identity, integration/data flows, networking, compute, storage/backup, observability) and synchronize with Service Delivery.
• Define and govern non‑functional requirements (availability, performance, recoverability/RTO‑RPO, scalability); align with SLAs and validate through DR testing.
• Establish Azure landing zone guardrails and baseline templates (IaaS/PaaS).
• Design hybrid connectivity and segmentation patterns with Operations (e.g., SD‑WAN, VPN, Private DNS, Private Link, ExpressRoute as applicable).
• Serve as design authority for PMO‑led projects; ensure solution designs meet standards, compliance inputs, and cost targets prior to build; clarify Ops‑led vs PMO‑led expectations.
• Partner with Service Delivery on demand intake and prioritization to prevent wrong‑team handoffs and keep backlogs prioritized.
• Collaborate with GRC on policy mapping and risk input; security architecture remains under GRC ownership while enterprise/cloud designs meet policy requirements.
• Drive FinOps governance with Operations/Finance (tagging, budgets, rightsizing, reservations) and report cloud cost variance to forecast.
• Maintain the technology debt register and publish modernization recommendations with owners and time horizons.
• Evangelize architecture: publish reference architectures, playbooks, and roadmaps; host office hours and education sessions for engineers and stakeholders
• Measure and report architecture KPIs (e.g., design review cycle time, standards adoption, CMDB data quality, DR test pass rate, cloud cost variance).
• Handover: Ensure runbooks, support models, monitoring/alerting, and CMDB updates are defined before service transition

Education, Experience & Skills