{"id":1436442,"url":"https://alion.io/job/first-student-inc-principal-enterprise-architect","title":"Principal Enterprise Architect","company":{"id":1861742,"name":"First Student","domain":"firststudentinc.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/firststudentinc-com","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":77,"open_postings":100,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.93,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":29,"computed_at":"2026-10-21T05:46:15Z"}},"role":"Solutions","role_family":"Solutions","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Cincinnati, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":130000,"max":180000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":180000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"Agile","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Jira","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Graph","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-14T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-14","last_verified_at":"2026-10-21T05:24:01Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":37,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":37},"description":"First 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 aboutto makebuilding 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 fromnothing. 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 howgood ideasmove 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.\nHowYou’llWork\nYouworkAI-native. You will not ship much code, but youdesign withfrontier 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 liveinthe 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 ofquestionrather 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:\nMaking buy, build, fold-in, or do-not-build calls on realrequests, andwriting down thereasoningso the decision holds the next time the question is asked.\n\nDesigning the integration and dataarchitectureso new products plug into the estate rather than wire themselves into it.\n\nBuilding out the safe harbor for business ideation and the gate that decides what happens to what comes out of it.\n\nWorking alongside the agentic delivery pod on a hard design, then carrying the resulting pattern outward to the teams that follow.\n\nResolving an open AI-native question that nobody has an established answer for yet.\n\nShapingenterprise knowledge management with the Product team so that principles, standards, and product knowledge are usable by machines as well as people.\n\nGetting ahead of a line of business that is about to standupsomething the enterprise already has.\n\nKey Responsibilities\nDecide what gets built\nHold binding authority on buy, build with agents, fold into an existing product, or do not build - across the full enterprise estate.\n\nOwn the intake and decision process behind that authority: how requests surface, how they are assessed, and how quickly they get an answer.\n\nDefault to buying the commodity and building thedifferentiator, andhold that line as agentic delivery makesbuildinglook free.\n\nOwn build-versus-buy evaluation, technical trade-offanalysis, andvendor and platform fit.\n\nKill redundancy before it exists. Preventing the fifth CRM is worth more than integrating it later.\n\nDocument decisions and theirreasoningso calls are consistent, reviewable, and reusable rather than re-argued every quarter.\n\nArchitect the enterprise estate for coherence\nServe 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\nSettle 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\nDesign 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\nSet cloud architecture direction on AWS - reference architectures, landing zones, and provisioning patterns, including environments autonomous agents canoperate insafely.\n\nMake a portfolio of distinct productsbehaveas a coherent whole, and surface where system and team boundaries need to move together.\n\nStand up the safe harbor and the gate\nDesign a contained environment where business teams can ideate andprototype withAI safely - sanctioned tooling, data boundaries, and blast-radius limits that make experimentation low-risk by construction.\n\nDefine 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\nKeep the boundary explicit. The harbor is for ideation,notproduction.A business builder does not drive a tool all the way to production; central IT carries good ideas forward.\n\nAssistin 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\nMake the harbor good enough that the field uses it instead of going around it. Containment that people resent does notcontainanything.\n\nMake architecture and knowledge machine-usable\nEnsure an enterprise ecosystem for knowledge management is designed, coherent, and adopted. The Product team may well own the capability itself; youownthat it exists at enterprise scope, hangs together, and is genuinelymachine-usable.\n\nProvide 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\nStructure architecture principles, standards, patterns, and decisions as consumable artifacts rather than shelfware, so teams and agentspull fromthem by default.\n\nShape 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\nEncode standards as reusable scaffolds, safe defaults, and automated checks, so the right way is the easywayand formal review is reserved for genuinely irreversible decisions.\n\nSet the pattern for agentic delivery\nDefine 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 andoperatesit; you decide what it has to hold true.\n\nWork inside the group design process as a contributor, not a downstream approver, while keeping the final call on the pattern.\n\nMake sure the first pod’s choices become the reusable pattern for the pods and teams that follow, rather than a one-off thathas tobe re-derived.\n\nDesign team boundaries and interactionmodesso the organization’s structure produces theloosely-coupled, fast-iterating architecture the strategy requires (inverse Conway).\n\nStay 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\nPartner 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\nMake the obligations attached to student and driver data, including FERPA and applicable privacy laws, inherited by construction rather than enforced by review.\n\nExtend that same treatment to the safe harbor and to autonomous agents, where dynamic access provisioning and business-built prototypes expand the surface thathas tostay 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 cannotdesign forthem. An AI specialist who cannot hold the big picture willoptimizeone corner and fragment everything around it. We need both in the same person.\n8+ years in enterprise, platform, or application architecture roles, withdemonstrateddepth and breadth across multiple IT domains and production systems at enterprise scale.\n\nDemonstrable, 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\nWorking understanding of AI architecture: agent orchestration and runtimes, control planes, inference gateways and model routing, knowledgebasesand context (RAG, MCP), evals, guardrails, and AI/MLOps.\n\nProven portfolio-level judgment: build-versus-buy decisions youowned, technical trade-off analysis, and the ability tomake a decisionstick with a line of business that wanted the other answer.\n\nDeep 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\nExperience architecting and integrating large-scale custom software products, internal and customer-facing, and making a portfolio of distinct productsoperateas a coherent whole.\n\nSolid cloud architecture experience, ideally AWS - reference architectures, landing zones, well-architected design, containers and serverless runtimes, and automated or dynamic provisioning.\n\nDesign and guidance experience in knowledge...","description_format":"text","description_chars":18130,"description_truncated":true,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"English","level":"Advanced (C1)","optional":true}]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Public Transport","Road Transport"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-29T03:21:32Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"green card filings: 1","filings_12m":0,"filings_prev_12m":2,"green_card_filings_12m":1,"median_offered_wage_usd":117500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":28,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.508,"p_room":0.55,"age_days":37,"expected_fill_days":29,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","urgency","win:tail","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-21T05:46:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":180000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/first-student-inc-principal-enterprise-architect","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/first-student-inc-principal-enterprise-architect.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-21T16:20:44Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":23178,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-22T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":1861742},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=1861742"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Ffirst-student-inc-principal-enterprise-architect"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Ffirst-student-inc-principal-enterprise-architect"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Ffirst-student-inc-principal-enterprise-architect"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/first-student-inc-principal-enterprise-architect\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Ffirst-student-inc-principal-enterprise-architect"}]}