Enterprise Architect

About the Opportunity:

We are seeking an Enterprise Architect to help lead the architecture change process governed by our Architecture Review Board (ARB). In this role you will evaluate proposed solutions across the full enterprise architecture landscape — Business, Data, Application, and Technology (BDAT) — assess them against our architecture principles, standards, and target-state roadmaps, and guide project and solution teams toward designs that are sound, secure, cost-effective, and strategically aligned.
This is a breadth-first role with depth in at least one domain. You will spend less time building systems and more time shaping how systems fit together, why they should exist, and what the enterprise should stop doing. You will need to be equally credible talking about a value stream with a business VP and a network topology with an infrastructure engineer.
Our environment includes on-premises data centers, mainframe workloads deployed to cloud, and a substantial Microsoft Azure footprint, so practical hybrid-enterprise experience matters.

Your Day-to-Day at Sagent:

Architecture Governance and the Review Board

• Co-lead the intake, triage, and review of architecture change requests entering the ARB, ensuring each submission has the artifacts, context, and analysis needed for an informed decision.
• Assess proposals against enterprise architecture principles, reference architectures, standards, and target-state roadmaps; identify risks, gaps, dependencies, and overlaps with existing capabilities.
• Facilitate ARB sessions: frame the decision, surface trade-offs, drive to a clear outcome, and prevent reviews from becoming design workshops.
• Author and maintain Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), conditional approvals, and time-bound exceptions or waivers, including the remediation path attached to each exception.
• Track accepted architecture risk and technical debt created through waivers, and report on it to governance and leadership forums.
• Evolve the governance process itself — review criteria, submission templates, fast-track paths for low-risk changes, and the definition of what does and does not require ARB review.
• Coach solution architects, engineers, and product teams so that proposals arrive review-ready and the standards are understood before designs are drawn.

Business Architecture

• Develop and maintain business capability models, value streams, and business process views, and use them to map where technology investment actually lands.
• Trace proposed changes back to business drivers, outcomes, and capability gaps; challenge initiatives that cannot articulate the capability they improve.
• Partner with business stakeholders and product owners to translate strategy and operating-model changes into architecture requirements and roadmap implications.
• Perform capability-based gap analysis between current and target state, and help sequence transition architectures that deliver value incrementally.

Data Architecture

• Define and govern enterprise data architecture: conceptual and logical data models, canonical and reference data, data domains, and authoritative sources of record.
• Review proposed changes for data integration patterns, data movement, latency and consistency requirements, lineage, and downstream impact on analytics and reporting.
• Partner with data governance, privacy, and security functions on data classification, retention, residency, sovereignty, and regulatory obligations.
• Guide the architecture of analytics and data platforms, including data warehouse, lakehouse, streaming, and master data management approaches, and the boundaries between operational and analytical estates.
• Reduce data duplication and point-to-point sprawl by promoting shared data services, contracts, and interoperability standards.

Application Architecture

• Maintain the application portfolio and its architecture views; lead rationalization efforts using lifecycle assessment (for example, tolerate / invest / migrate / eliminate) to reduce redundancy and cost.
• Define application reference architectures and patterns: integration and API strategy, event-driven and messaging patterns, service boundaries, modularity, and modernization approaches for legacy and mainframe-hosted workloads.
• Guide build-versus-buy-versus-configure decisions, including SaaS evaluation, extensibility and lock-in considerations, and the total cost of ownership over the asset's life.
• Ensure proposed applications and integrations meet non-functional requirements — availability, scalability, performance, observability, resilience, and supportability — and that those requirements are stated explicitly rather than assumed.
• Set standards for API management, interface contracts, and versioning so integrations remain governable as the portfolio changes.

Technology Architecture

• Own and evolve technology reference architectures and standards spanning compute, platform, network, and infrastructure services across on-premises, hybrid, and Azure environments.
• Provide architectural direction for cloud and hybrid network design, including segmentation, connectivity between data centers, cloud-hosted mainframe workloads, and Azure landing zones.
• Embed security and identity architecture into designs: zero-trust principles, network segmentation, encryption in transit and at rest, identity and access management, and secrets management.
• Set expectations for resilience, disaster recovery, and business continuity — recovery objectives, failover patterns, and the architectural evidence required to demonstrate them.
• Maintain a technology lifecycle view and technology radar: what is emerging, standard, contained, or being retired, and the roadmap for eliminating unsupported components.
• Partner with platform and DevOps teams on Infrastructure as Code, automation, and reference implementations so that approved patterns are the easiest ones for teams to adopt.

Cross-Cutting Responsibilities

• Apply a structured architecture method (TOGAF ADM or equivalent) proportionally — enough rigor to make good decisions, not so much that delivery stalls.
• Maintain the architecture repository, metamodel, and artifact standards so that views across BDAT stay connected and current rather than becoming shelfware.
• Contribute to multi-year architecture roadmaps and to portfolio and investment planning, including cost optimization, licensing, and cloud consumption efficiency (FinOps).
• Communicate architecture positions to audiences ranging from engineering teams to executive leadership, adjusting altitude and vocabulary without losing accuracy.
• Influence outcomes without direct authority, building the working relationships that make governance feel like support rather than obstruction.

We'd Love to Hear from You If You Have

Education

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Experience

• Significant experience in enterprise, domain, or solution architecture, including demonstrable work across at least three of the four BDAT domains and deep expertise in at least one.
• Direct experience participating in or supporting an Architecture Review Board, design authority, or comparable governance body — including making a recommendation that was unpopular and defending it well.
• Experience developing architecture artifacts that were actually used: capability models, current- and target-state views, roadmaps, reference architectures, and decision records.
• Hands-on background in a hybrid enterprise environment spanning on-premises infrastructure and a major public cloud, with practical Azure experience strongly preferred.
• Experience with application portfolio rationalization, integration architecture, or large-scale modernization of legacy or mainframe-hosted workloads.
• Exposure to regulated or audited environments and the compliance obligations that shape architecture decisions.

Certifications

• TOGAF certification (Foundation or Practitioner) strongly preferred; equivalent frameworks such as Zachman, ArchiMate certification, or SAFe Architect are also valued.
• Azure Solutions Architect Expert or comparable cloud architecture certification.
• Certifications in security, data, or integration domains are a plus (for example, CISSP, CCSP, CDMP).

Skills

• Strong grasp of enterprise integration patterns, API and event-driven architecture, and the trade-offs between them.
• Solid data architecture fundamentals: modeling, master and reference data, data governance, and analytics platform patterns.
• Working knowledge of Azure PaaS and SaaS services, networking, identity, and security controls, plus core networking concepts including routing, VPNs, firewalls, and load balancing.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code and automation tooling (Terraform, PowerShell, Python) sufficient to review designs credibly and collaborate with platform teams.
• Ability to evaluate and articulate cost, risk, and TCO implications of architecture options in terms a business sponsor can act on.

Soft Skills

• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to make a complex trade-off legible on a single page.
• Strong facilitation skills and the composure to run a room where stakeholders disagree.
• Analytical rigor balanced with pragmatism — able to say "good enough for now, and here's what we'll revisit" and mean it.
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity, incomplete information, and competing priorities.
• Collaborative and credible with both technical practitioners and business leaders; able to work independently and as part of a team.

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