Senior Director, Enterprise Architecture – AdTech - FreeWheel

FreeWheel, a Comcast company, provides comprehensive ad platforms for publishers, advertisers, and media buyers. Powered by premium video content, robust data, and advanced technology, we’re making it easier for buyers and sellers to transact across all screens, data types, and sales channels. As a global company, we have offices in nine countries and can insert advertisements around the world.

Job Summary

FreeWheel’s Enterprise Architecture team partners closely with Product Management and Engineering to translate business strategy, market opportunities, Product roadmaps, and technology constraints into scalable product architectures and Engineering roadmaps. The Senior Director, Enterprise Architecture is the senior leader responsible for building and leading a team of Enterprise Architects supporting FreeWheel’s product portfolio and providing technical direction to the Engineering organization.

This role combines people leadership, portfolio-level architecture leadership, and organizational influence. The Sr Director will shape the architecture strategy for FreeWheel’s AdTech platforms, establish architecture governance and standards, guide investment decisions, and ensure product and engineering teams are aligned on pragmatic, scalable, secure, and cost-efficient technology choices. The leader in this role will also help modernize the architecture practice, elevate solution quality across the portfolio, and build strong partnerships with Product, Engineering, Operations, Security, Data, and client-facing stakeholders.

Job Description

Core Responsibilities

• Lead, develop, and manage a team of Enterprise Architects who align to Product domains and partner closely with Engineering teams across FreeWheel’s AdTech platforms.
• Define and drive the Enterprise Architecture vision, operating model, and engagement approach for Product-facing EA, ensuring architecture work is tightly connected to business outcomes, product strategy, and delivery priorities.
• Serve as a strategic technology advisor to Product Management and Engineering leadership, translating market opportunities, portfolio priorities, and client requirements into actionable architecture direction and investment recommendations.
• Oversee creation of solution blueprints, reference architectures, architecture decision records (ADRs), roadmaps, and target-state designs that improve consistency, reuse, and execution quality across the portfolio.
• Establish and run effective architecture governance mechanisms, including design reviews, decision forums, standards management, exception handling, and architecture lifecycle oversight.
• Guide architectural direction for distributed, cloud-native systems spanning ad serving, SSP, DSP, audience/identity, measurement, revenue science, APIs, and data platforms.
• Ensure architectural strategies balance speed of delivery with long-term maintainability, operability, resiliency, privacy, security, interoperability, and cost efficiency.
• Partner with Infrastructure & Platform Architecture so that our products and solutions are consistent with EA’s technical direction on platform modernization, domain boundaries, integration patterns, event-driven architectures, data contracts, and shared platform capabilities.
• Shape portfolio-level roadmaps that reduce technical debt, rationalize legacy patterns, and create reusable platforms, paved roads, and golden paths for engineering teams.
• Influence build, buy, extend, customize, and retire decisions by evaluating business value, complexity, architectural fit, risk, and total cost of ownership.
• Take part in identifying opportunities to apply generative AI and agentic AI across product and internal workflows. Play a lead role in establishing architecture guardrails for governance, privacy, security, evaluation, and human oversight.
• Drive measurable improvements in architecture maturity, engineering effectiveness, software quality, system reliability, scalability, security posture, and cost transparency.
• Represent Enterprise Architecture in senior leadership forums and cross-functional planning processes; contribute to strategic planning, portfolio prioritization, and major initiative reviews.
• Build strong partnerships across the Product, Commercial, and Engineering organizations, including Product Management, Security, Data, Platform, Operations, and client-facing teams to improve organizational alignment and accelerate delivery.
• Coach and mentor architects and senior technical leaders, helping grow talent, improve architectural rigor, and create a high-performing, collaborative architecture community.
• Consistent exercise of independent judgment and discretion in matters of significance.
• Regular, consistent and punctual attendance.
• Other duties and responsibilities as assigned.
  

Leadership Expectations

• Operate as a people leader first and an architecture leader always: Build an engaged, high-performing team with clear priorities, accountability, and development plans.
• Create clarity for both Product and Engineering by framing architecture choices in terms of customer value, market differentiation, technical risk, and time-to-impact.
• Raise the bar on enterprise and portfolio thinking by promoting reuse, standardization, and platform leverage without slowing innovation.
• Lead with pragmatism: Enable teams to deliver near-term commitments while steadily driving modernization and reduction of architectural friction.
• Influence through credibility, relationships, and thoughtful decision-making across organizational boundaries rather than relying solely on authority.
• Enable healthy technical debate, drive decisions to closure, and ensure architecture guidance is documented, socialized, and actionable.
• Foster a culture of inclusion, learning, and continuous improvement across the architecture practice and the broader engineering organization.
• Demonstrate sound judgment in balancing business priorities, operational risks, organizational readiness, and technology strategy.
  

Experience and Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, software architecture, or enterprise architecture, including significant experience leading architecture for distributed, high-scale platforms.
• 10+ years of people leadership experience managing senior architects, principal engineers, or comparable senior technical individual contributors.
• Experience partnering with Product Management and Engineering leadership to define architecture strategy, roadmaps, and execution plans for complex product portfolios.
• Strong knowledge of modern cloud-native architecture, including microservices, Kubernetes, APIs, event-driven systems, resiliency patterns, observability, and security-by-design.
• Demonstrated ability to lead architectural direction for complex >

  Skills

  Advertising Technologies, Building High Performance Team, Business Leadership, Enterprise Software Architecture, Product Development, Stakeholder Management, Strategic Management

  Compensation

  Primary Location Pay Range: $205,230.06 - $307,845.09This job can be performed in Illinois, and Denver Campus with a Pay Range of $179,576.30 - $307,845.09Comcast intends to offer the selected candidate base pay within this range, dependent on job-related, non-discriminatory factors such as experience. The application window is 30 days from the date job is posted, unless the number of applicants requires it to close sooner or later.

  Base pay is one part of the Total Rewards that Comcast provides to compensate and recognize employees for their work. Most sales positions are eligible for a Commission under the terms of an applicable plan, while most non-sales positions are eligible for a Bonus. Additionally, Comcast provides best-in-class Benefits to eligible employees. We believe that benefits should connect you to the support you need when it matters most, and should help you care for those who matter most. That’s why we provide an array of options, expert guidance and always-on tools, that are personalized to meet the needs of your reality – to help support you physically, financially and emotionally through the big milestones and in your everyday life. Please visit the compensation and benefits summary on our careers site for more details.

  Education

  Bachelor's DegreeWhile possessing the stated degree is preferred, Comcast also may consider applicants who hold some combination of coursework and experience, or who have extensive related professional experience.

  Certifications (if applicable)

  Relevant Work Experience

  10 Years +Comcast is an equal opportunity workplace. We will consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other basis protected by applicable law.