Director, Architecture

About this role

If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.

Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.

At WGU, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their position, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is:   Grade: Executive Technical 716

Pay Range: $190,100.00 - $342,200.00 Job Description

WGU is transforming its technology ecosystem from the ground up—modernizing our core platforms, rethinking how our systems connect, and actively embedding AI throughout the university. We are building toward a modern, cloud-based, event-driven architecture designed to increase agility, scalability, interoperability, and our ability to rapidly deliver better experiences for students and staff.

The Director of Enterprise Architecture will play a critical leadership role in this transformation. You will translate WGU’s business and technology strategy into the architecture direction, standards, patterns, and roadmaps that shape our next-generation technology ecosystem.

You will lead and develop a team of architects while partnering across engineering, product, data, security, infrastructure, and business teams to drive significant technology decisions. This is an opportunity to help design what comes next—not simply govern what already exists.

Success requires a combination of people leadership, enterprise architecture expertise, modern technical depth, AI experience, and executive influence. You must be equally comfortable coaching senior architects, navigating complex technical tradeoffs, and presenting a compelling recommendation to executive leaders.

This is a role for an experienced architecture leader—not a first-time people leader or an individual contributor looking to make the transition into management.  

What You’ll Do Shape Our Next-Generation Architecture • Help drive WGU’s transformation toward a modern, cloud and mesh-based, loosely coupled, event-driven technology ecosystem. • Translate strategy into target-state architectures, transition roadmaps, standards, and reusable patterns. • Help rethink and modernize legacy platforms, integrations, and architectural patterns rather than simply extending them. • Guide significant decisions spanning applications, integration, platforms, data, cloud, security, and AI. • Identify opportunities to simplify our technology landscape, reduce technical debt, improve interoperability, and increase reuse. • Partner with technology and business leaders on modernization, platform, build-versus-buy, and other consequential technology decisions. • Evaluate emerging technologies and determine where they can create meaningful, sustainable value for WGU.

Build and Lead a Strong Architecture Team • Lead, coach, and develop a high-performing team of architects. • Create clear expectations for technical excellence, architectural judgment, business partnership, and communication. • Develop architects who can independently lead complex domains and transformation initiatives. • Attract, develop, and retain senior architecture talent. • Build a strong architecture community and promote consistent practices across WGU.

Advance Modern Architecture • Provide leadership and deep expertise in SOA, APIs, microservices, mesh architecture, messaging, and enterprise integration patterns. • Establish modern patterns for service boundaries, domain ownership, APIs, events, integration, interoperability, and data exchange. • Help teams make thoughtful tradeoffs across synchronous services, asynchronous events, APIs, packaged platforms, and data integration. • Champion architectures designed for scalability, resilience, observability, security, maintainability, and rapid change. • Partner closely with engineering leaders to turn architectural direction into working software and platforms. • Maintain enough technical depth to challenge assumptions, architectural designs, and coach architects through difficult decisions.

Embed AI Throughout WGU AI is an active part of WGU’s transformation—not a future aspiration or isolated innovation initiative. • Provide architecture leadership as WGU integrates AI capabilities throughout our products, platforms, operations, and technology ecosystem. • Apply real-world experience taking AI solutions from concept to implementation at an enterprise level. • Help establish architecture patterns for generative AI, LLMs, RAG, agentic systems, AI orchestration, model and tool integration, and AI-enabled workflows. • Help establish the foundational platforms, integration patterns, data access, security, observability, and guardrails needed to scale AI responsibly across the enterprise. • Partner with product, engineering, data, security, and business teams to turn AI opportunities into production capabilities. • Help teams distinguish where AI creates meaningful value—and where traditional software, automation, integration, or analytics is the better solution. • Continuously evaluate a rapidly ch

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