Principal Enterprise Architect, Business Systems & Data (R5535)

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.

What you'll do:: Define and evolve the target-state enterprise systems and data architecture across major business domains, including G&A, product, engineering, operations, and supply-chain-adjacent capabilities. dataforest+4 Lead the discovery and rationalization of function-level and shadow IT stacks, documenting current-state architectures, identifying overlap and risk, and proposing a phased roadmap toward a more coherent enterprise landscape. Design and govern architecture patterns for regulated multi-environment operations, including commercial and future government-hosted systems, with clear principles for data zoning, system placement, and cross-environment interaction. Partner with the Cloud & Infrastructure and Security & Compliance teams on the infrastructure and security implications of architectural decisions, while remaining focused on system, data, and integration architecture. Define approved integration patterns between business systems, data platforms, and domain technologies, including API, event-driven, and batch data movement approaches where appropriate. Guide decisions about where sensitive, controlled, or regulated data and workloads should live, and how enterprise systems should interact without violating policy or creating unsustainable architecture debt. Provide architectural oversight and decision support for major cross-domain, strategic programs such as ERP implementation, data platform modernization, domain onboarding, and future product/engineering data initiatives. Establish architecture review practices, reference architectures, and reusable standards so teams can move faster without solving the same structural problems repeatedly. Coach software engineering teams on enterprise architecture principles, design standards, and system trade-offs through design reviews, architecture forums, and hands-on guidance that raises architectural maturity across the organization Act as a strategic partner to the Sr. Director of Enterprise Data &