Executive Director, Platform Architecture (AWS)

Location: Chicago, United States; hybrid work environment with up to 2 days per week of remote work.

Salary: $198,200–$346,700 per year, plus potential discretionary incentive compensation.

Company

hirify.global is a systemically important financial market utility providing clearing and settlement services for options, futures, and securities lending transactions.

What you will do

• Lead and develop a team of principal architects across cloud, on-premises infrastructure, networking, compute, storage, containers, and observability.
• Define and govern enterprise-wide platform architecture standards, reference architectures, infrastructure patterns, and non-functional requirements.
• Set the infrastructure modernization and cloud adoption strategy, including AWS workloads, hybrid connectivity, GitOps, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Guide architecture for Kubernetes/EKS, Kafka, Flink, networking, storage, security, and other foundational platform capabilities.
• Partner with Engineering, Application Architecture, Security, Operations, Governance, Risk, and Compliance on strategic technology decisions.
• Establish resilience, disaster recovery, observability, capacity planning, and performance engineering practices for critical market infrastructure.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or systems architecture, including at least 3 years in people leadership or team lead roles.
• Experience defining and governing infrastructure architecture standards across multiple domains at organizational scale.
• Deep AWS architecture experience, including VPC, EC2, EKS, MSK, S3, IAM, KMS, Direct Connect, Transit Gateway, and security services.
• Strong knowledge of Kubernetes, enterprise Kafka, hybrid networking, infrastructure-as-code, and GitOps using tools such as Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, or Flux.
• Ability to align Engineering, Security, Operations, Governance, and senior leadership around implementable platform strategy.
• BS degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Mathematics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Experience in regulated financial services, including clearinghouses, exchanges, banks, or other financial market infrastructure.
• Familiarity with Regulation SCI, CPMI-IOSCO, or equivalent resilience frameworks.
• Production experience with Apache Flink, enterprise observability platforms, low-latency computing, or high-performance computing.
• AWS Solutions Architect certification and familiarity with TOGAF or comparable enterprise architecture frameworks.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work environment with up to 2 remote days per week and a technology stipend for remote work.
• Collaborative environment focused on work-life balance and employee wellness.
• Tuition reimbursement and student loan repayment assistance.
• Generous PTO, parental leave, competitive medical, dental, and vision benefits.
• 401(k) employer match and eligibility for a discretionary performance-based bonus.

Hiring process

• Apply through the hirify.global careers site and submit a resume.
• Receive email confirmation that the application was received.
• If selected for an interview, an hirify.global representative will arrange the date, time, and location.