Principal Domain Architect

NOTE:  This position is Hybrid - requiring 3 days in office - at one of our locations:  Allentown, PA; Louisville, KY or Providence, RI.  #INDPPL   #LI-Hybrid

The Domain Architect – Field Technology (Gas & Electric Utility) will serve as a senior architecture leader within PPL’s Enterprise Architecture community, supporting the Field Technology domain across electric and gas operations. This role is a core member of the team responsible for driving PPL Enterprise Architecture technology standards across Field Technology Value Streams, ensuring consistent application of standards, patterns, and governance across both new and existing platforms.

The Domain Architect will lead the development and governance of field value stream-wide architectural strategies, ensuring alignment between business outcomes and IT execution, while adhering to PPL EA principles and standards for Field Technology Value Stream platforms. The role is accountable for maximizing value, minimizing risk, and accelerating transformation of business and digital strategy—enabling modernization, optimizing IT investments, and improving the reliability, scalability, security, and agility of technology platforms that support field operations and broader corporate objectives.

The successful candidate will have demonstrated experience defining and implementing complex enterprise architectures across key areas including Business Architecture; Data & Information Architecture and Governance; Enterprise Architecture Operating Model; EA Strategy and Planning; Enterprise IT Governance; Infrastructure and Cloud Architecture; Integration Architecture; Security Architecture; Solution and Application Architecture; and Technology Platforms.

This position reports to the Senior Director, Enterprise Technology, and partners closely with the IT Field value stream leader, business partners, product owners, and engineering teams to ensure architectural coherence, delivery enablement, and measurable outcomes.

Strategic Leadership

• Develop Point of Views on technology, industry and market trends, and determine their potential impact on the Field Technology Value Stream
• Drive innovation by aligning the mindset towards moving from technology driven to business outcome driven architecture
• Collaborate with the IT Portfolio Enterprise Architect and other Value Stream Domain Architects on the creation and/or evolution of the EA function or program.
• Collaborate with IT and Business leaders to develop digital vision and build the digital strategy for Field Technology Value Stream
• Analyze the current Field Technology environment to detect critical capability gaps and recommend solutions for improvement. Promote configuration and parameterization over customization
• Develop and maintain field operations architecture roadmaps including applications, integrations, data, and infrastructure
• Enable transformation and delivery of key field operations systems, including:
• • EAM / Work Management (e.g., Hexagon EAM, OpenGrid)
  • GIS – ESRI ArcGIS
  • OMS / ADMS
  • Mobile workforce management
  • Scheduling and dispatch
• Lead the identification and analysis of enterprise business drivers to derive enterprise business, information, technical and solution (BITS) architecture requirements
• Consult with application/infrastructure development projects to fit systems to architecture, and identify when it is necessary to modify the technical architecture to accommodate project needs
• Understand, advocate and support the enterprise's information technology strategies
• Responsible for the development and ongoing support of key architectural solution components
• Drive the continual development of the architectural runway for the Field Technology Value Stream
• Manages and is accountable for driving the development of solution for Field Technology Value Stream architecture issues

Architecture Governance

• Contribute to the Field Architecture community and help to define and promote architecture principles, frameworks and governance processes.
• Define standards for solution architecture, integration, and data management across platforms.
• Establish, enforce and govern reference architectures, design principles and authoritative systems of records for assets, work and crews
• Review solution designs to ensure alignment with enterprise and domain architecture
• Identify and manage cross value stream integration complexity and dependencies

Solutions Architecture:

• Assesses wider industry technology trends (e.g., artificial intelligence, robot process automation, internet of things, cloud, DevOps, microservices, event-driven architectures etc.) and best practices to identify best-in-class Technology and architecture direction
• Serve as the architecture authority for field operations capabilities, including:
  • Work and asset management
  • Field mobility
  • Outage and emergency response
  • Vegetation management and compliance
• Partner closely with Field Ops leadership to translate operational needs into scalable architectural solutions.
• Additional responsibilities include:
  • Contribution towards the improvement of the Architecture review process
  • Develop and drive architectural technology standards within their specific discipline
  • Governance of architecture standards
  • Technology strategy
• Works with various Field Technology teams to champion the adoption of patterns, platforms, and tools to support the usage and conformity of solution architecture
• Collaborate with cybersecurity and compliance teams to align architectures with security and compliance requirements

Risk & Compliance

• Ensure Field Technology Value Stream complies with cybersecurity, data privacy, and industry regulations 
• Design architecture that is resilient, secure, and supports disaster recovery strategies.

Stakeholder Management

• Act as a trusted advisor to senior stakeholders in IT, operations, and business.
• Work with project managers, solution architects, and delivery teams to ensure solutions align with enterprise architecture.

Required Qualifications & Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree.
• Masters degree highly preferred.
• 10-Year background in delivering scalable, compliant, Enterprise Architecture.
• Knowledge of work management, asset management, geospatial, and mobility functional domains and platforms / architectures
• Enterprise Asset Management (Hexagon, Maximo, SAP, OpenGrid), geographical and design platforms (ArcGIS, AUD), operations mobile tool landscape knowledge, middleware architecture (light-weight containerization), and integration with enterprise, customer, back office, and other systems desirable.
• Proven experience with cloud platforms, hybrid architecture.
• Utilities Enterprise Architecture and field operations experience/knowledge a plus

Skills & Competencies:

• Strategic thinking and business acumen.
• Deep understanding of enterprise integration patterns and field technologies.
• Excellent knowledge of utility industry processes and regulatory requirements.
• Strong leadership, communication, and stakeholder engagement skills.
• Familiarity with modern architecture trends.
• Core Skills
• • SAFe Agile
  • Application Design & Architecture
  • Big Data Technologies
  • AI (AI/ML, GenAI, Agentic)
  • Cloud Fundamentals
  • Data & Information Security
  • DevOps Practices
  • Event Driven & API based Architectures
  • Roadmap Creation and Product Vision
  • Security Fundamentals
  • Vendor Landscape

• Application Architecture

• • N-Tier
  • Microservices
  • Event-driven
  • Domain Driven Design

• Collaboration Tools

• • Agile work management tooling expertise

• Architecture experience supporting field operations for electric/gas utilities (construction, maintenance, inspections, leak surveys, emergency response, outage/restoration, switching, safety/compliance).
• Proven ability to design field-to-enterprise workflows spanning work orders, asset registry, location/GIS edits, inspection forms, materials, time capture, customer/service impacts, and operational reporting.
• Hands-on architecture experience with EAM in utilities in a transmission and distribution (T&D) context, including:
• • Work management patterns (e.g., PM/CS or utilities work management equivalents), work order lifecycle, functional location/equipment, notifications, confirmations, materials integration.
  • Designing EAM integrations with ERP (finance, supply chain, human experience management)
• Architecture experience with Esri ArcGIS in a utility context (ArcGIS Enterprise / ArcGIS Online patterns as applicable), including:
• • GIS as a critical dependency for field execution: network/asset spatial context, map services, feature edits, and field data capture.
  • Designing GIS integrations with SAP (work order initiation, asset/location synchronization, and bi-directional status updates). 
• Architecture experience with Hexagon EAM/field mobility and associated enterprise integrations, including Mobile execution patterns (task-focused UX, inspections/checklists, asset registry access, data capture) and integration of data flows back to SAP and/or the enterprise integration layer. 
• Experience architecting solutions involving OpenGrid (and/or comparable utility field/workforce platforms)
• Experience supporting multi-OpCo company utility models
• Integrating field tooling with enterprise systems to “bring the most critical information forward” for field teams and modernize field management workflows.
• Ability to work across vendor ecosystems where OpenGrid is one of multiple platforms in the landscape.