Senior Director, Head of Enterprise Architecture

Senior Director, Head of Enterprise Architecture

Information Technology

San Jose, United States

• 32749

Hungry, Humble, Honest, with Heart

The Opportunity: Nutanix is establishing Enterprise Architecture as a core enterprise function for the first time. We are seeking a pragmatic, strategic, and highly credible Head of Enterprise Architecture to build this capability from the ground up and make it a trusted mechanism for connecting business strategy, operating-model evolution, and technology investment.

This leader will define how Nutanix makes enterprise technology decisions: establishing the principles, standards, governance, and decision rights that enable speed with discipline. The role will create a clear target-state architecture and a sequenced, multi-year transformation roadmap across application, integration, platform, data, information, and AI architecture.

The successful candidate will be equally comfortable in an executive strategy discussion and a detailed architecture review. They will bring clarity to ambiguity, earn trust across business and technology communities, and turn architecture into an actionable instrument for simplification, modernization, resilience, and better investment outcomes.

About the Team: This role reports to our Chief Information & Digital Officer. This team will build and lead a centralized Enterprise Architecture function that gives Nutanix a coherent view of its enterprise capabilities, technology landscape, and future-state choices thereby improving the quality, speed, and economic value of strategic decisions.

Your Role: This is a foundational opportunity to shape how Nutanix evolves its enterprise. The Head of Enterprise Architecture will create the connective tissue between business ambition and technology execution, giving leaders a durable framework for making choices that compound over time.

Establish the Enterprise Architecture function

• Define the Enterprise Architecture charter, operating model, engagement model, and annual priorities.
• Establish enterprise architecture principles, standards, reference architectures, patterns, and technology guardrails.
• Create a practical architecture repository and a transparent view of business capabilities, applications, integrations, platforms, data, and dependencies.
• Build a high-performing centralized team and define how it partners with domain and delivery architects across the enterprise.

Connect strategy to technology investment

• Partner with executive leadership and business-function leaders to translate strategic priorities into business capabilities, operating-model implications, and technology choices.
• Create the target-state enterprise architecture and maintain a sequenced, multi-year transformation roadmap.
• Align architecture priorities with portfolio planning, funding, product and platform strategy, annual operating plans, and major transformation programs.
• Provide clear options, trade-offs, recommendations, and decision materials for executive and investment forums.

Create effective governance and decision rights

• Design and lead an architecture review and governance process that is rigorous, lightweight, and focused on business outcomes.
• Build executive sponsorship and organizational adoption of Enterprise Architecture as an enterprise decision-making process, not merely an IT review or compliance checkpoint.
• Establish and facilitate an empowered enterprise architecture decision-making and approval body with clear membership, scope, decision rights, escalation paths, and operating cadence.
• Own enterprise architecture standards, principles, exception governance, and final architecture recommendations within the established decision model.
• Clarify decision rights across enterprise, domain, solution, data, security, infrastructure, and application architecture.
• Establish mechanisms to identify and manage architectural risk, technical debt, duplication, lifecycle exposure, and deviations from target state.

Modernize and simplify the enterprise

• Lead architecture direction for application, integration, and platform modernization, including rationalization and reuse.
• Define an enterprise approach to data, information, and AI architecture that supports trusted data, responsible adoption, interoperability, and scale.
• Identify opportunities to reduce complexity, improve resilience and security, eliminate duplication, and lower total cost of ownership.
• Ensure architecture decisions support delivery velocity rather than becoming a barrier to innovation.

Lead through influence and partnership

• Build strong relationships with IT leadership, engineering, security, infrastructure, data, and application teams.
• Partner with Finance, Procurement, Risk, Compliance, and other governance functions to embed architecture into planning and control processes.
• Communicate complex architectural choices in clear business language and create alignment among stakeholders with competing priorities.
• Develop the architecture community through coaching, standards, reusable practices, and a culture of constructive challenge.

What You Will Bring:

• Significant experience leading enterprise architecture, technology strategy, or large-scale transformation in a complex, global organization.
• Demonstrated success building or materially maturing an Enterprise Architecture function, including governance, standards, operating model, and talent.
• Strong understanding of business architecture and the relationship between operating models, capabilities, processes, data, applications, platforms, and investment decisions.
• Deep experience across application, integration, and platform architecture, with strong fluency in data, information, and AI architecture.
• A track record of shaping multi-year technology roadmaps and translating them into sequenced, fundable initiatives.
• Experience creating architecture review and exception-management processes that improve outcomes without slowing delivery.
• Executive presence and the ability to influence senior leaders, business partners, engineers, and architects with equal credibility.
• Excellent written, verbal, and visual communication skills, including the ability to explain complex trade-offs simply.
• Sound judgment, intellectual curiosity, pragmatism, and comfort operating in ambiguity.
• A leadership style that combines high standards with collaboration, transparency, and respect for diverse perspectives.

How you lead

You are a builder who can start with a blank page and create structure without creating bureaucracy. You move fluidly between enterprise strategy and technical detail, ask incisive questions, and make recommendations grounded in value, risk, feasibility, and timing. You know when to standardize, when to allow choice, and when to make a decision with imperfect information.

You are commercially and operationally minded: architecture is not an academic exercise, but a means to improve business agility, investment quality, resilience, security, and the employee and customer experience. You earn influence through clarity, consistency, and delivery.

Work Arrangement:

This role is based in San Jose, CA. Should the role be within 50 miles of a Nutanix office, it will require coming into an office a minimum of 3 days per week. Additional team-specific guidance and norms will be provided by your manager.

Pay Transparency:

The pay range for this position at commencement of employment i