Executive Director Platform Architecture

To be considered for this position applications and resumes are accepted only through our careers site by directly applying to the posted job. We do not accept unsolicited resumes or sales solicitations from staffing agencies. Any OCC employee wishing to submit a referral must do so through their Workday account. Any resume submitted outside of an active job posting will not be considered for employment.

What You'll Do:

The Executive Director Platform Architecture leads OCC's Platform Architecture team owning the technical strategy and standards for all infrastructure domains — cloud onpremises networking compute storage and observability. This is a people leadership role responsible for developing a team of principal architects and ensuring their work produces coherent enterprise-wide platform standards rather than isolated domain expertise.

The Executive Director Platform Architecture translates OCC's resilience objectives and regulatory obligations into actionable platform architecture strategy drives adoption of that strategy across Engineering and Operations and ensures the platform layer keeps pace with OCC's technology transformation — including the Renaissance/Ovation program and ongoing cloud adoption.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities:

To perform this job successfully an individual must be able to perform each primary duty satisfactorily.

Lead the Platform Architecture Team

• Lead develop and set direction for a team of principal architects covering cloud on-premises infrastructure networking compute storage and observability domains

• Own the Platform Architecture vision: deliver the resilient scalable foundation upon which critical market functions depend — making resilience the default not the exception          

• Ensure individual architect domain expertise is synthesized into coherent enterprise-wide platform standards — not siloed recommendations

• Manage team priorities capacity and delivery against architecture commitments across programs and initiatives Develop team members through coaching feedback and exposure to enterprise-scale architectural challenges

Define and Govern Platform Architecture Standards

• Establish and maintain authoritative platform architecture standards spanning cloud (AWS) on-premises data center hybrid connectivity networking compute storage and container platforms

• Define reference architectures and infrastructure patterns that Engineering and application teams can consume without requiring per-project architecture engagement Own non-functional requirements standards at the platform level — availability fault tolerance disaster recovery latency throughput and capacity — as first-class concerns applicable across all tiers of OCC's system portfolio

• Enforce platform standards through Architecture Review Board participation and design review processes

• Maintain infrastructure architecture documentation ADRs and transition plans that accurately reflect current and target state

Drive Infrastructure Modernization and Cloud Strategy

• Own OCC's infrastructure architecture strategy for cloud adoption — defining what moves to AWS what remains on-premises and how hybrid connectivity is structured

• Ensure cloud architecture patterns for networking security identity and compute are consistent compliant and operationally sound across all workloads Drive GitOps and infrastructure-as-code adoption — pipeline standards environment promotion configuration management and secrets management at enterprise scale

• Lead architecture direction for container platform (Kubernetes/EKS) streaming infrastructure (Kafka) and stream processing (Flink) as foundational platform capabilities

• Identify and systematically reduce infrastructure risk — single points of failure end-of-life dependencies capacity constraints and gaps in recovery capabilities

Partner Across the Organization

• Serve as the primary platform architecture partner to Application Architecture ensuring application designs are grounded in platform reality and platform capabilities evolve to meet application needs

• Collaborate with Engineering Security and Operations to ensure platform architecture decisions are implementable operable and aligned to security requirements

• Engage with Technology Leads program management and senior leadership to represent platform architecture in strategic planning budgeting and vendor decisions

• Coordinate with Governance/Risk and Compliance to ensure platform architecture satisfies OCC's regulatory obligations under Regulation SCI and CPMI-IOSCO resilience principles

Ensure Operational Resilience

• Establish observability standards — metrics logging distributed tracing and alerting — as platform-level capabilities delivered to all application teams

• Define and govern disaster recovery business continuity and resilience architecture across infrastructure domains

• Drive capacity planning and performance engineering practices; ensure the platform is sized and architected ahead of demand not reactive to it

• Lead platform architecture participation in incident postmortems; ensure operational findings drive durable infrastructure improvements

Supervisory Responsibilities

• Manages a team of principal architects and senior individual contributors across infrastructure architecture domains

Qualifications:

The requirements listed are representative of the knowledge skill and/or ability required.  Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the primary functions.

Required

• 12+ years of experience in infrastructure platform or systems architecture with at least 3 years in a people leadership or team lead role

• Demonstrated experience defining and governing infrastructure architecture standards across multiple domains at organizational scale

• Broad hands-on knowledge across infrastructure domains:

• cloud (AWS) on-premises data center networking compute storage and container platforms

• Deep experience with AWS architecture — VPCs EC2 EKS MSK S3 IAM KMS Direct Connect Transit Gateway and security services

• Strong working knowledge of Kubernetes — cluster architecture workload design multi-tenancy networking (CNI) and operational patterns at scale

• Experience with Apache Kafka as enterprise streaming infrastructure — deployment operations and topology design

• Demonstrated experience leading GitOps and infrastructure-as-code programs — Terraform Helm ArgoCD Flux or equivalent

• Experience with hybrid and on-premises/cloud connectivity architecture — network design routingfirewalling and security zoning

• Ability to lead through influence and authority — building alignment across Engineering Security Operations and Governance

• Strong communication skills — able to represent infrastructure strategy to executive leadership and translate architecture decisions into actionable standards for engineering teams

Preferred

• Experience in financial services particularly regulated environments (SIFMU clearinghouse exchange or bank)

• Familiarity with Regulation SCI CPMI-IOSCO or equivalent financial market infrastructure regulatory frameworks and their implications for infrastructure design

• Experience with Apache Flink or equivalent stream processing frameworks in production environments

• Experience with enterprise observability platforms — OpenTelemetry Prometheus Grafana Splunk or equivalent

• Familiarity with low-latency and high-performance computing patterns relevant to risk and clearing workloads AWS Solutions Architect — Professional certification or equivalent

• Experience with enterprise architecture frameworks such as TOGAF

Technical Skills

• Cloud: AWS foundational and advanced services — EC2

• EKS MSK S3 VPC IAM KMS Direct Connect Transit Gateway CloudWatch

• Container platforms: Kubernetes (EKS or self-managed)

• Docker Helm container networking (CNI)

• Streaming and processing: Apache Kafka Apache Flink

• GitOps and IaC: Terraform ArgoCD Flux Helm GitHub Actions or Jenkins

• Networking: routing protocols firewalling load balancing

• DNS hybrid connectivity network security zoning

• Storage: block object and file storage architecture; backup and recovery patterns

• Observability: OpenTelemetry Prometheus Grafana Splunk or equivalent

• Unix/Linux environments; artifact management (Nexus Artifactory)

Education and/or Experience

• BS degree in Computer Science Information Systems Mathematics or a similar technical field or equivalent practical experience.

• 12+ years of relevant work experience.

Certificates or Licenses

• AWS Solutions Architect — Associate or Professional (preferred)

About Us

The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) is the world's largest equity derivatives clearing organization. Founded in 1973 OCC is dedicated to promoting stability and market integrity by delivering clearing and settlement services for options futures and securities lending transactions. As a Systemically Important Financial Market Utility (SIFMU) OCC operates under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. OCC has more than 100 clearing members and provides central counterparty (CCP) clearing and settlement services to 19 exchanges and trading platforms. More information about OCC is available at www.theocc.com.

Benefits

A highly collaborative and supportive environment developed to encourage work-life balance and employee wellness. Some of these components include:

• A hybrid work environment up to 2 days per week of remote work
• Tuition Reimbursement to support your continued education
• Student Loan Repayment Assistance
• Technology Stipend allowing you to use the device of your choice to connect to our network while working remotely
• Generous PTO and Parental leave
• 401k Employer Match
• Competitive health benefits including medical dental and vision

Visit https://www.theocc.com/careers/thriving-together for more information.

Compensation

• The salary range listed for any given position is exclusive of fringe benefits and potential bonuses. If hired at OCC your final base salary compensation will be determined by factors such as skills experience and/or education.
• In addition we believe in the importance of pay equity and consider internal equity of our current team members as part of any final offer.
• We typically do not hire at the maximum of the range in order to allow for future and continued salary growth. We also offer a substantial benefits package as noted on www.theocc.com/careers
• All employees may be eligible for a discretionary bonus. Discretionary bonuses are based on various factors including but not limited to company and individual performance and are not guaranteed.

Salary Range

Incentive Range

This position is eligible for an annual discretionary incentive compensation award for which the target range is listed above (see Incentive Range). The amount of such award if any will be based on various factors including without limitation both individual and company performance.

Step 1
When you find a position you're interested in click the 'Apply' button. Please complete the application and attach your resume.  

Step 2
You will receive an email notification to confirm that we've received your application.

Step 3
If you are called in for an interview a representative from OCC will contact you to set up a date time and location. 

For more information about OCC please click here.

OCC is an Equal Opportunity Employer

What We Do

As the foundation for secure markets OCC is a customer-driven organization that delivers world-class Risk Management Clearing and Settlement Services for a sophisticated mix of financial products that includes standard options stock loans and futures contracts.

Why Work With Us

We're bound together by values and behaviors that shape the way we work and live from team projects to after-hours events and to making a difference in our communities. OCC colleagues thrive in an atmosphere of intellectual curiosity creative problem-solving and effective interaction.

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