Principal Enterprise Architect

Job Description:\n\nFirst Student is North America's leading provider of student transportation, helping millions of students get to and from school safely each day. Our technology teams build and support the operational, safety, customer, and employee-facing systems behind that work, including our HALO platform.\nAI is an area of active investment for us. We are moving toward a world where we can build what we need quickly and safely, and this role exists to make sure that speed produces a coherent enterprise rather than a fragmented one.\nAbout the Role\nYou own the architecture of First Student's technology estate through its transition to an AI-native operating model - and you hold the call on what we build, what we buy, and what we do not build at all.\nThat last one is the point. Agentic development is about to make building software cheap. Cheap building without architecture produces an outcome most enterprises have already lived through once: thousands of Access databases, data scattered, unsecured, and poorly structured, and five custom CRMs because five lines of business each wanted their own. AI lets that happen faster and with more polish, which makes it more dangerous, not less. Your job is to prevent that while still letting us build whatever we genuinely need, with ease.\nThis is a binding-authority seat. Buy it, build it with agents, fold it into an existing product, or do not build it - your decision stands. There are no direct reports; the authority comes from the seat and from the quality of your reasoning, not from headcount.\nYou are not starting from nothing. We have a draft set of architecture principles and standards, a current view of the value stream, a prototype AI-native SDLC, and an agent control plane and runtime already in early use. Central IT does the majority of AI development today, with small pockets emerging in the field. What is thin is the thinking on how the business can safely ideate with AI inside a container, and how good ideas move through a gate into real products. That is the widest gap between what exists and what we need, though it is a smaller share of the job than deciding what gets built at all and making the enterprise buildable AI-natively.\nOur default lean is to buy the commodity and build the differentiator. SaaS for what is not specific to student transportation; build where our operating model is the advantage - routing, driver, operations, safety. Holding that line against "we could just build it now" is a real part of the job.\nHow You'll Work\nYou work AI-native. You will not ship much code, but you design with frontier models and agents daily - authoring skills, rules, harnesses, and agentic workflows, and prototyping when a prototype is the fastest way to prove a design. This is not background familiarity. You cannot design agent-consumable architecture, interfaces, or knowledge if you do not live in the tools. Your output is architecture and decisions: patterns, reference designs, ADRs, standards, evals, and calls that hold.\nAuthority is the backstop, not the operating style. You set the pattern and keep the final call, but you earn agreement inside the design process rather than ruling on it afterward. Teams should want you in the room early, not dread the review at the end.\nYou also own a class of question rather than a fixed list. As the organization goes AI-native, settled assumptions come loose: whether work management built for humans reading tickets survives contact with agentic delivery, where documentation has to live for agents to consume it natively, how systems and agents talk to each other, who owns which entity and where copies of data are allowed. Jira-or-no-Jira is only an example. These questions arrive continuously, and you are the person who resolves them.\nA typical week may include:\n\n \n Making buy, build, fold-in, or do-not-build calls on real requests, and writing down the reasoning so the decision holds the next time the question is asked.\n\n \n Designing the integration and data architecture so new products plug into the estate rather than wire themselves into it.\n\n \n Building out the safe harbor for business ideation and the gate that decides what happens to what comes out of it.\n\n \n Working alongside the agentic delivery pod on a hard design, then carrying the resulting pattern outward to the teams that follow.\n\n \n Resolving an open AI-native question that nobody has an established answer for yet.\n\n \n Shaping enterprise knowledge management with the Product team so that principles, standards, and product knowledge are usable by machines as well as people.\n\n \n Getting ahead of a line of business that is about to stand up something the enterprise already has.\n\nKey Responsibilities\nDecide what gets built\n\n \n Hold binding authority on buy, build with agents, fold into an existing product, or do not build - across the full enterprise estate.\n\n \n Own the intake and decision process behind that authority: how requests surface, how they are assessed, and how quickly they get an answer.\n\n \n Default to buying the commodity and building the differentiator, and hold that line as agentic delivery makes building look free.\n\n \n Own build-versus-buy evaluation, technical trade-off analysis, and vendor and platform fit.\n\n \n Kill redundancy before it exists. Preventing the fifth CRM is worth more than integrating it later.\n\n \n Document decisions and their reasoning so calls are consistent, reviewable, and reusable rather than re-argued every quarter.\n\nArchitect the enterprise estate for coherence\n\n \n Serve as the enterprise-wide architectural authority across the full estate: custom digital products (payroll, driver, operations, routing, scheduling, and customer- and employee-facing applications), the SaaS and ERP portfolio, cloud, data, and integration.\n\n \n Settle system-of-record ownership and the canonical data model - which entity lives where, who owns it, and where copies are allowed. This is the control that prevents the Access-database outcome at AI speed.\n\n \n Design the enterprise integration layer as a reusable, self-service capability teams adopt rather than request: API-first contracts, an event backbone, service and tool discovery, and identity for non-human actors.\n\n \n Set cloud architecture direction on AWS - reference architectures, landing zones, and provisioning patterns, including environments autonomous agents can operate in safely.\n\n \n Make a portfolio of distinct products behave as a coherent whole, and surface where system and team boundaries need to move together.\n\nStand up the safe harbor and the gate\n\n \n Design a contained environment where business teams can ideate and prototype with AI safely - sanctioned tooling, data boundaries, and blast-radius limits that make experimentation low-risk by construction.\n\n \n Define the gate: how an idea coming out of the harbor is assessed, what qualifies it to move forward, and what happens to it - carried forward by central IT into an existing digital product, stood up as a new one, or discarded as redundant.\n\n \n Keep the boundary explicit. The harbor is for ideation, not production. A business builder does not drive a tool all the way to production; central IT carries good ideas forward.\n\n \n Assist in the design of the citizen toolset itself, so what the business builds is legible to IT and usable as a requirements artifact rather than a mystery to reverse-engineer.\n\n \n Make the harbor good enough that the field uses it instead of going around it. Containment that people resent does not contain anything.\n\nMake architecture and knowledge machine-usable\n\n \n Ensure an enterprise ecosystem for knowledge management is designed, coherent, and adopted. The Product team may well own the capability itself; you own that it exists at enterprise scope, hangs together, and is genuinely machine-usable.\n\n \n Provide the design and guidance for how knowledge lives in an AI world - structure, retrievability, ownership, and freshness - so agents and people consume it natively instead of hunting through documents nobody reads.\n\n \n Structure architecture principles, standards, patterns, and decisions as consumable artifacts rather than shelfware, so teams and agents pull from them by default.\n\n \n Shape AI-native work planning, prioritization, and completion tracking, including whether tooling built for human-read tickets still fits when agents are primary consumers of work.\n\n \n Encode standards as reusable scaffolds, safe defaults, and automated checks, so the right way is the easy way and formal review is reserved for genuinely irreversible decisions.\n\nSet the pattern for agentic delivery\n\n \n Define what the paved road must guarantee - the control-plane pattern, agent runtime patterns, guardrails, evals, supervision, and observability substrate that keep autonomous systems in bounds. The agentic delivery pod builds and operates it; you decide what it has to hold true.\n\n \n Work inside the group design process as a contributor, not a downstream approver, while keeping the final call on the pattern.\n\n \n Make sure the first pod's choices become the reusable pattern for the pods and teams that follow, rather than a one-off that has to be re-derived.\n\n \n Design team boundaries and interaction modes so the organization's structure produces the loosely-coupled, fast-iterating architecture the strategy requires (inverse Conway).\n\n \n Stay deliberately agile as the underlying tooling evolves. Pilot, prototype, and recommend where new capability should be adopted, including EV technology, IoT and on-vehicle systems, cloud-native patterns, and frontier AI.\n\nBuild security and compliance in by construction\n\n \n Partner closely with the Senior Director of Cybersecurity and their team, who own risk assessment, to encode security, privacy, and regulatory requirements as policy-as-code and safe defaults.\n\n \n Make the obligations attached to student and driver data, including FERPA and applicable privacy laws, inherited by construction rather than enforced by review.\n\n \n Extend that same treatment to the safe harbor and to autonomous agents, where dynamic access provisioning and business-built prototypes expand the surface that has to stay compliant.\n\nRequired Qualifications\nTwo bars, and both are hard. You need real enterprise architecture breadth - the ability to hold the whole estate in your head and see the second-order effects of a decision - and you need to work AI-native yourself. A strong traditional architect who has read about agents cannot design for them. An AI specialist who cannot hold the big picture will optimize one corner and fragment everything around it. We need both in the same person.\n\n \n 8+ years in enterprise, platform, or application architecture roles, with demonstrated depth and breadth across multiple IT domains and production systems at enterprise scale.\n\n \n Demonstrable, current, hands-on practice working AI-native with frontier models and agents - authoring skills, rules, harnesses, and agentic workflows, and using them as your actual method of designing and deciding. This is measured by what you are doing now, not by years.\n\n \n Working understanding of AI architecture: agent orchestration and runtimes, control planes, inference gateways and model routing, knowledge bases and context (RAG, MCP), evals, guardrails, and AI/MLOps.\n\n \n Proven portfolio-level judgment: build-versus-buy decisions you owned, technical trade-off analysis, and the ability to make a decision stick with a line of business that wanted the other answer.\n\n \n Deep integration and data architecture experience - API-first contracts, event and data streaming, canonical models, system-of-record ownership, and integration between enterprise systems such as ERP, payroll and HR, and proprietary platforms.\n\n \n Experience architecting and integrating large-scale custom software products, internal and customer-facing, and making a portfolio of distinct products operate as a coherent whole.\n\n \n Solid cloud architecture experience, ideally AWS - reference architectures, landing zones, well-architected design, containers and serverless runtimes, and automated or dynamic provisioning.\n\n \n Design and guidance experience in knowledge management for an AI world: how documentation, standards, and institutional knowledge are structured so machines can use them.\n\n \n Hands-on background across a full agile SDLC - discovery, scoping (PRDs and ADRs), delivery, testing, deployment, and support - with enough full-stack and DevOps grounding to be credible with engineers.\n\n \n Experience in enterprise environments with real security, governance, data-handling, and regulatory constraints.\n\n \n Strong written and verbal communication, including explaining architectural direction and trade-offs to both technical and executive audiences.\n\n \n Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.\n\nPreferred Qualifications\n\n \n Familiarity with architecture frameworks (TOGAF, C4, Zachman, FEAF) as practical tools rather than as the job itself. TOGAF certification a plus.\n\n \n AWS certification, for example Solutions Architect - Professional.\n\n \n Experience governing citizen development or low-code platforms at enterprise scale, including intake, promotion, and sunset.\n\n \n Experience consolidating or retiring redundant systems, and living with the organizational friction that comes with it.\n\n \n Experience with docs-as-code, developer portals, knowledge graphs, or MCP servers as machine-facing knowledge surfaces.\n\n \n Experience with policy-as-code (for example OPA) and compliance-by-construction in regulated environments.\n\n \n Platform-first architecture depth: base platform and child applications, plus shared services such as auth and accounts, messaging and notifications, search, files and media, and localization.\n\n \n Experience with EV technology, IoT, telematics, and on-bus or on-vehicle technology solutions.\n\n \n Experience with transportation, logistics, routing, geospatial, or operations-focused software.\n\n \n Experience applying AI in governed enterprise environments, including FERPA-relevant or similarly regulated data.\n\nWhat Success Looks Like\nAt 6 months: Buy, build, fold-in, and do-not-build decisions are running through a working intake with you as the decision-maker, and the reasoning behind them is written down where it can be reused rather than re-argued. Direction is set on system-of-record ownership and on the integration fabric. The draft principles and standards have moved toward artifacts teams and agents actually consume, and the enterprise approach to machine-usable knowledge has a real design behind it. Central IT is designing and planning against patterns you defined, and the agentic delivery pod is building on them rather than inventing its own. A first version of the safe harbor is standing in a contained environment with a defined gate.\nA

About us\r\nAn industry leader famous for our yellow school buses and service and safety excellence, we’ve provided student transportation services to schools for over 100 years. Continually investing in the services of the future, we’re proud to be part of FirstGroup America – the largest provider of safe, reliable and sustainable surface passenger transportation services in North America.\r\n\r\nIndustry leader\r\nWe safely operate more than one third of all contracted school buses in North America.\r\nTogether our 50,000 school buses travel nearly 600 million miles per year the equivalent of 1,200 round trips to the moon.\r\nWe operate in around 550 locations throughout 38 U.S. states and 8 Canadian provinces.\r\n\r\nInnovation\r\nWe were the first school bus company to utilize global positioning systems (GPS), so at any one time we know where all of our buses are and how fast they’re travelling.\r\nPassionate about safety, we’ve installed Safety Crossing Gates on the front of all of our school buses and use the Child Check-MateTM electronic reminder system to make sure no sleeping children remain inside a bus at the end of each route.\r\n\r\nAwards & recognition\r\nWe won the Occupational Excellence Achievement Award from the National Safety Council two years in a row.\r\nDedicated to safety, FirstGroup received the National Safety Council’s (NSC) Green Cross for Safety Medal - the highest award for safety in North America.\r\n\r\nTeamwork and trust\r\nIt takes a diverse team of skilled professionals to provide a safe, effective and efficient student transportation system. From our school bus drivers and location managers to routers, dispatchers and fleet technician mechanics, the work we do every day makes a big impact on the daily lives of students, parents, local communities and school district partners.\r\n\r\nWe’re very proud of our elite team of over 55,000 dedicated, caring and diverse professionals. And they are the #1 reason we’re trusted by over 1,400 school districts - more than any other provider. Everybody here plays their part in creating a positive school bus experience.\r\n\r\nOur culture\r\nWe live and breathe our vision and values. They are embedded in our culture and drive our commitment to our customers and communities. Our culture fosters growth and promotes respect, reliability, responsibility and safety. And we recruit people who share these values and will work together to build strong and trusting partnerships in the communities we serve.\r\n\r\nSafety – Although our safety record is twice as safe as the industry average, we continually seek out opportunities to enhance our operational and safety initiatives.\r\nLearning – Through our learning culture that spans over 550 locations, we receive and share insight from our people to enhance our service now and in the future.\r\nMaking a difference - By doing our job well, we make a positive impact on many lives – including the millions of students who travel with us every school day.\r\nCareers for all – We’re an Equal Opportunity Employer and an Employer of Choice.\r\nBy consistently encouraging and supporting an open dialogue with our people and partners, we’re able to share new ideas and develop new ways to meet the needs of our customers and passengers. At First Student, you’ll feel empowered to serve your community. So join the team and start to make a difference.