Principal IT Architect (Operational Technology)

About this role

Are you looking for an exciting job where you can put your skills and talents to work at a company you can feel proud to be a part of? Do you want a workplace that will challenge you and offer you opportunities to learn and grow?  A   position at Xcel Energy could be just what you’re looking for.

Position Summary

The Principal IT Architect for Operational Technology serves as a strategic technical and architectural authority for mission-critical operational technology platforms and environments. The role provides architectural leadership, operational insight, and cross-functional coordination across complex technology ecosystems where reliability, security, compliance, and business continuity are essential. 

This role acts as a bridge between architecture, operations, cybersecurity, infrastructure, identity, network, vendor, and business teams, ensuring operational systems are designed, integrated, modernized, and supported in a manner that enables safe, reliable, and sustainable business operations.  The Principal Architect is expected to think beyond individual project delivery by developing platform roadmaps, reusable capabilities, architecture standards, and long-term technology strategies that reduce complexity, manage risk, and improve operational outcomes across the enterprise. 

Essential Responsibilities  Operational Technology Strategy & Architecture Leadership  • Provide architectural leadership and subject matter expertise for mission-critical operational technology platforms operating in highly available, regulated, or industrial environments. 

• Serve as a consultative, trusted advisor during system modernization, platform upgrades, integration challenges, production incidents, and operational reliability concerns. 

• Develop, defend, and operationalize a clear OT technology strategy that supports safe, reliable operations while enabling modernization under cybersecurity, compliance, and operational constraints. 

• Create and maintain platform roadmaps that guide long-term technology evolution, capability reuse, technical debt reduction, and operational sustainability. 

• Ensure OT platforms evolve coherently across the enterprise rather than through isolated, project-specific technology decisions. 

• Promote architecture decisions that balance innovation, operational stability, risk management, supportability, and cost effectiveness.   

Architecture & Design Collaboration  • Lead and influence architecture and design discussions for complex technology initiatives spanning multiple platforms, domains, and stakeholder groups. 

• Author and maintain architecture standards, reference patterns, and design guidance that serve as reusable building blocks for OT and mission-critical technology implementations. 

• Ensure solution designs account for long-term maintainability, operational support, resiliency, scalability, and business value, not only project delivery objectives. 

• Review and influence solution architectures to ensure alignment with enterprise strategies, technology roadmaps, cybersecurity requirements, and operational needs. 

• Promote reuse of capabilities, reduction of duplicate solutions, and deliberate retirement of technical debt.   

Operational Systems Integration  • Provide architectural leadership for integrations between operational technology platforms, enterprise systems, data platforms, and external partners. 

• Guide architecture decisions involving real-time and near real-time data exchange, telemetry, event-driven integration, control workflows, and operational data flows. 

• Validate that integration designs support performance, resilience, data integrity, security, determinism, and operational continuity requirements. 

• Partner with application, data, infrastructure, network, vendor, and operations teams to resolve integration issues that cross traditional technology boundaries.   

Security, Identity, Access & Risk Coordination  • Guide architecture decisions involving identity management, access controls, trust boundaries, network segmentation, cybersecurity requirements, and secure operational access patterns. 

• Consult with cybersecurity, IAM, network, infrastructure, operations, and vendor teams to shape solutions where IT and OT boundaries intersect. 

• Identify and address architectural risks that may impact operational reliability, regulatory obligations, cybersecurity posture, or business continuity. 

• Partner across teams to clarify ownership, accountability, and design responsibilities for security and integration issues that span multiple organizations.   

Operational Excellence, Observability & Reliability  • Advocate for operational readiness, observability, supportability, and resilience throughout the solution lifecycle. 

• Ensure monitoring, alerting, logging, reporting, recovery, and support requirements are incorporated into architecture and validated before production deployment. 

• Drive architecture practices that improve system reliability, availability, maintainability, and operational efficiency. 

• Support modernization efforts while maintaining continuity of critical business operations and minimizing risk to production environments.   

Cross-Team Collaboration & Communication  • Lead collaboration across architecture, engineering, operations, cybersecurity, infrastructure, vendors, and business stakeholders to resolve complex technology challenges. 

• Translate highly technical OT and architecture concepts into clear, actionable guidance for leadership and non-technical stakeholders. 

• Build alignment across historically siloed teams by establishing shared understanding, common technical language, and consistent architectural approaches. 

• Influence enterprise-wide technology decisions through expertise, strategic thinking, relationship management, and practical architecture leadership. 

• Mentor architects and technical leaders to improve architectural maturity, standards adoption, and

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