Enterprise Architecture Director

We're Hiring: Enterprise Architecture Director

Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

Employment Type: Full-Time

Experience Level: Senior

Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a globally focused organization committed to building scalable, secure, resilient, and digitally enabled business capabilities across diverse markets.

Our Technology, Product, Data, Security, Operations, and Business teams collaborate to establish a coherent enterprise technology landscape, modernize platforms, enable strategic transformation, and ensure technology investments remain aligned with long-term business objectives.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Enterprise Architecture Director to lead enterprise architecture strategy, technology governance, architecture standards, digital transformation, technology modernization, and long-term enterprise technology planning.

The ideal candidate will provide strategic architecture leadership across business, application, data, technology, security, integration, and cloud domains. They will translate business strategy into target-state architecture, guide major technology investments, manage architectural risk, and establish governance that enables innovation while maintaining scalability, security, resilience, and operational efficiency.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and own the enterprise architecture strategy and multi-year architecture roadmap.
• Align enterprise architecture with corporate strategy, business capabilities, operating models, and transformation priorities.
• Establish enterprise architecture principles, standards, reference architectures, patterns, and governance frameworks.
• Define current-state, transitional-state, and target-state enterprise architectures.
• Maintain an enterprise architecture repository covering business, application, data, technology, security, integration, and infrastructure domains.
• Develop enterprise capability maps and connect business capabilities to technology investments.
• Lead architecture assessments for major transformation programs, technology initiatives, and strategic investments.
• Evaluate the existing technology landscape and identify modernization, consolidation, rationalization, and optimization opportunities.
• Define target-state architecture for core business platforms, digital products, enterprise applications, and technology services.
• Provide architecture leadership for cloud adoption, hybrid-cloud strategies, and technology modernization.
• Establish cloud architecture principles, standards, landing-zone requirements, and governance models.
• Guide decisions regarding public cloud, private cloud, hybrid environments, and on-premises technology.
• Lead application and technology portfolio rationalization initiatives.
• Identify legacy systems, technical debt, architectural risks, duplication, and unsupported technologies.
• Develop technology lifecycle-management strategies and modernization priorities.
• Establish architecture review boards, governance processes, decision rights, and architectural approval mechanisms.
• Review and approve solution architectures for major technology programs and strategic initiatives.
• Ensure solution architectures align with enterprise standards, security requirements, integration principles, and target-state architecture.
• Provide architectural oversight across application, data, infrastructure, integration, cloud, cybersecurity, and digital domains.
• Establish enterprise integration principles and standards for APIs, event-driven architecture, messaging, middleware, and system interoperability.
• Define enterprise data architecture principles covering data domains, ownership, governance, integration, quality, and lifecycle management.
• Collaborate with Data and Analytics teams to establish scalable data platforms and information architectures.
• Work closely with Cybersecurity teams to embed security architecture and risk management into enterprise technology decisions.
• Ensure architecture decisions address resilience, disaster recovery, business continuity, privacy, identity, access management, and regulatory requirements.
• Establish technology standards for interoperability, scalability, observability, reliability, performance, and maintainability.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and assess their strategic relevance to the organization.
• Monitor developments in AI, automation, cloud computing, edge computing, APIs, distributed systems, data platforms, and other emerging technologies.
• Establish responsible architecture principles for AI-enabled solutions, including security, governance, privacy, data protection, and operational considerations.
• Lead architecture strategy for digital transformation and enterprise modernization programs.
• Translate complex business requirements into scalable technology strategies and architecture solutions.
• Partner with business leaders to understand strategic priorities, operating-model changes, and future capability requirements.
• Facilitate architecture workshops with executives, business stakeholders, technology teams, vendors, and strategic partners.
• Provide architectural input into business cases, investment proposals, procurement decisions, and technology strategy.
• Assess technology options based on business value, total cost of ownership, scalability, security, resilience, complexity, and strategic alignment.
• Establish technology decision frameworks and support build-versus-buy evaluations.
• Review major vendor and platform selections from an enterprise architecture perspective.
• Collaborate with Procurement, Finance, Legal, Security, and Technology teams during strategic technology sourcing.
• Establish architecture requirements for strategic technology contracts and vendor engagements.
• Manage relationships with technology vendors, cloud providers, systems integrators, and architecture partners.
• Review external solution designs and ensure vendor architectures comply with enterprise standards.
• Establish technical due-diligence processes for acquisitions, partnerships, new platforms, and major technology investments.
• Lead technology integration planning for mergers, acquisitions, business expansion, and organizational transformation where applicable.
• Establish architecture risk-management processes and maintain an enterprise architecture risk register.
• Identify architectural dependencies, constraints, bottlenecks, and technology risks across the enterprise.
• Develop mitigation strategies for critical architecture and technology risks.
• Monitor technical debt and establish plans for reducing high-impact architectural deficiencies.

Key Performance Indicators

• Enterprise architecture roadmap execution
• Architecture strategy alignment with business objectives
• Target-state architecture adoption
• Architecture governance compliance
• Architecture review completion
• Architecture decision turnaround time
• Architecture exception rate
• Architecture exception resolution
• Technology portfolio rationalization
• Legacy-system reduction
• Technical-debt reduction
• Application portfolio optimization
• Technology standardization rate
• Architecture reuse rate
• Cloud adoption and modernization progress
• Cloud cost optimization
• Technology lifecycle compliance
• Unsupported-technology reduction
• System interoperability
• API and integration standard compliance
• Enterprise data-architecture adoption
• Cybersecurity architecture compliance
• Technology resilience
• Availability of critical platforms
• Disaster-recovery architecture compliance
• Business-continuity readiness
• Architecture risk reduction
• Critical technology-risk remediation
• Vendor architecture compliance
• Technology investment alignment
• Technology total-cost optimization
• Build-versus-buy decision effectiveness
• Strategic technology initiative delivery
• Transformation architecture readiness
• Architecture-related project delivery performance
• Architecture quality
• Solution architecture compliance
• Architecture documentation completeness
• Technology roadmap accuracy
• Technology dependency visibility
• Technical-debt visibility
• Architecture governance effectiveness
• Stakeholder satisfaction
• Architecture team capability development
• Architecture standards adoption
• Innovation and emerging-technology adoption
• Technology modernization value realization
• Architecture-driven cost savings
• Technology investment ROI

Ideal Candidate

The successful candidate should have strong experience in enterprise architecture, technology strategy, solution architecture, digital transformation, IT governance, cloud architecture, or technology leadership, preferably within a complex multinational, technology-driven, financial, professional-services, industrial, or large-scale enterprise environment.

The candidate should demonstrate:

• Extensive experience developing and implementing enterprise architecture strategies.
• Strong understanding of business, application, data, technology, security, and integration architecture domains.