Principal Enterprise Architect - United Airlines

There’s never been a more exciting time to join United Airlines. We’re on a path towards becoming the best airline in the history of aviation. Our shared purpose – Connecting People, Uniting the World – is about more than getting people from one place to another. It also means that as a global company that operates in hundreds of locations around the world with millions of customers and tens of thousands of employees, we have a unique responsibility to uplift and provide opportunities in the places where we work, live and fly, and we can only do that with a truly diverse and inclusive workforce. And we’re growing – in the years ahead, we’ll hire tens of thousands of people across every area of the airline. Our careers include a competitive benefits package aimed at keeping you happy, healthy and well-traveled. From employee-run "Business Resource Group" communities to world-class benefits like parental leave, 401k and privileges like space available travel, United is truly a one-of-a-kind place to work. Are you ready to travel the world?

We believe that inclusion propels innovation and is the foundation of all that we do. United's Digital Technology team spans the globe and is made up of diverse individuals all working together with cutting-edge technology to build the best airline in the history of aviation. Our team designs, develops and maintains massively scaling technology solutions brought to life with innovative architectures, data analytics, and digital solutions.

Key Responsibilities:

*Please note that this role is hybrid and requires in office attendance 2-3 days per week in Chicago or Houston.

The Principal Enterprise Architect will play a key role in influencing United Airline’s IT digital strategy as well as providing tactical architecture direction to ensure the enterprise can achieve the strategy. This individual will provide strategic advice and guidance to functional team(s). Highly skilled with broad, advanced technical and cloud experience especially related to IT disciplines. This role serves as an inspiring leader to challenge/direct all levels across the organization to rethink routine, adopt new best practices, and drive adoption of technology standards. The individual will also apply enterprise architecture governance over solutions that provide technical capabilities

• Collaborate with domain architects, engineers, and leaders to develop technical standards, reference architectures, design patterns, opinion papers, and architecture decision frameworks that guide technology solutions, especially those requiring integration of multiple platforms, operating systems, and applications across the business.
• Develop and manage a technical strategy and coordinates adoption. This individual will be responsible to architect enterprise guidance that conveys standard processes and common pitfalls for system design, infrastructure integrations, application development practices, and application runtime principles.
• Manage the architecture review process by creating validation checklists, reviewing architectural artifacts, and providing domain specific guidance to drive architectural alignment across the enterprise.
• Leads cultural change for United cloud adoption. This role will actively promote cloud services where appropriate within the business to ensure that the organization properly architects business solutions for cloud. The role must push the organization through thought leadership to incorporate cloud computing accurately and effectively.
• Apply architectural and engineering concepts to design solutions that meet operational requirements, such as scalability, maintainability, security, reliability, extensibility, flexibility, availability, and manageability.
• Conduct research and develop Proof of Concepts on emerging technologies and implementation toolkits in support of anticipated development efforts and recommend technologies that functionally robust and cost effective. Research, enforce, and drive the adoption of design patterns throughout the enterprise and evangelizes standard processes for solution design and development.
• Identify new technologies, industry trends, and standard methodologies, which should be incorporated into BFS policies & roadmap
• Plays a critical role in translating business strategy into technical strategy and defines end-to-end technology architectures that support the strategy.
• Lead all aspects of the evaluation and selection of 3rd party software packages (including SaaS) as well as the design of standard application configuration of these packages
• Develop and maintain relevant Enterprise Architecture artifacts and store within the EA repository, including – current state architecture, standards, reference architectures, capability maps

United values diverse experiences, perspectives, and we encourage everyone who meets the minimum qualifications to apply. While having the “desired” qualifications make for a stronger candidate, we encourage applicants who may not feel they check ALL of those boxes! We are always looking for individuals who will bring something new to the table!

What’s needed to succeed (Minimum Qualifications):

• Bachelor Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, other computer related field required
• Minimum 10 years of demonstrable experience of which at least five years of relevant Enterprise Architecture experience
• Prior experience as a Principal Enterprise Architect, Chief Architect, Head of Enterprise Architecture in a global organization
• Experience providing guidance and defining strategy for how companies should deal with technology
• Work with Domain Architects and Solution Architects in preparation for Architecture Review Board (ARB), Architecture Portfolio Management, Architecture Assessment
• Provide guidance, oversight, and coaching to the Domain and Solution architects
• Review and sign off architecture designs
• Drive improvements of architecture processes, methodologies, and services, ensuring the quality of architecture assets
• Develop architecture metrics and plans to achieve results
• Technical writing skills for documenting environments and procedures
• Deep hands-on experience in leading the design, development and deployment of business software at scale
• Good experience in technology infrastructure, network, compute, storage, and virtualization
• Deep experience with Cloud computing technologies and workload transition challenges
• Prior experience of managing challenges of migrating systems and workloads to the Cloud
• Experience with AWS application migration and implementations
• Deep understanding of cloud computing technologies and workload transition challenges
• Ability to partner within and across teams to gain consensus and enable change
• Good communication skills for creating and sharing presentations to multiple levels of audiences of partners - i.e. senior leaders in business and IT, architects, developers, etc.
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States for any employer without sponsorship

What will help you propel from the pack (Preferred Qualifications):

• Master's degree in Computer Science
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional Certification or better (Solution Architect, Developer, or SysOps)
• Enterprise Architecture Certification (Zachman, Togaf, Gartner)
• 3-5 years of EA experience
• 3-5 years of AWS experience
• Airline Experience

United Airlines is an equal opportunity employer. United Airlines recruits, employs, trains, compensates and promotes regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical ability, age, veteran status and other protected status as required by applicable law. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform crucial job functions. Please contact JobAccommodations@united.com to request accommodation.