Job Description

One of the best-known names in cruising, Princess is the world’s leading international premium cruise line and tour company, carrying millions of guests each year to hundreds of destinations around the globe.  We give our guests the Medallion Class experience others simply can’t. The Love Boat promises something for everyone. 

The Principal Enterprise Architect, Infrastructure Virtualized Solutions serves as the organization’s highest-level technical authority and a globally recognized external thought leader in enterprise virtualization, hybrid infrastructure, resilient computing, storage, workload mobility, disaster recovery, and infrastructure automation.

The role defines and governs the global infrastructure architecture strategy supporting complex shoreside and fleet operations. It establishes the long-term architecture vision, enterprise principles, reference models, technology standards, and investment direction for platforms that enable mission-critical operational, guest-facing, and corporate services.

Operating with enterprise-wide authority and substantial independence, the role proactively identifies and solves the organization’s most complex and unprecedented infrastructure challenges. It develops innovative solutions from first principles when established practices, technologies, or precedents are insufficient. Decisions made by the role materially influence business continuity, cybersecurity posture, global scalability, capital investment, technology risk, operational performance, and the strategic direction of the business.

The role leads the organization’s largest, most strategically significant, and technically complex multidisciplinary infrastructure transformation initiatives. These initiatives span fleet and shoreside environments, data centers, cloud platforms, cybersecurity, application ecosystems, engineering, and business operations.

The role participates directly in the development of business and technology strategy and advises executive leadership on emerging technologies, strategic risk, enterprise investment, operational resilience, and the infrastructure capabilities required to support long-term growth and innovation.

Through external professional leadership, strategic technology partnerships, and engagement with major vendors and industry bodies, the role influences industry practices and technology roadmaps. It originates major architectural innovations expected to advance the infrastructure architecture profession and establish the organization as a leader in secure, resilient, and globally distributed technology environments.

Here’s a summary of what Princess is looking for in a Principal Enterprise Architect. Is this you? 

Responsibilities:

Enterprise Architecture Strategy, Authority, and Governance

• Define and govern the global infrastructure architecture strategy across virtualized compute, storage, networking, private and public cloud, workload mobility, disaster recovery, automation, and platform engineering.

• Establish the long-term architecture vision, enterprise principles, reference models, technology standards, decision frameworks, and investment roadmaps supporting global shoreside and fleet operations.

• Exercise final enterprise architectural authority for the organization’s most complex, highest-risk, and most strategically significant infrastructure solutions and transformation initiatives.

• Lead enterprise architecture review boards, resolve architectural conflicts across functions and platforms, and approve exceptions to enterprise standards based on business value, strategic risk, and long-term architectural integrity.

• Establish architecture health metrics and executive-level reporting that identify enterprise risk, technical debt, modernization opportunities, and strategic investment requirements.

Business, Technology, and Investment Strategy

• Participate directly in the formulation of enterprise business and technology strategy, translating long-range business objectives into global infrastructure capabilities, architecture roadmaps, and investment priorities.

• Advise executive leadership on how emerging technologies and infrastructure capabilities can enable business growth, fleet expansion, guest experience innovation, operational resilience, and enterprise risk reduction.

• Identify and sponsor opportunities where infrastructure innovation can create new business capabilities or materially improve the organization’s global operating model.

• Shape and materially influence enterprise infrastructure investment strategy, including major capital expenditures, operating expenditures, sourcing decisions, and long-range financial plans.

• Evaluate the business, financial, operational, cybersecurity, regulatory, and technology implications of major infrastructure investments and present executive-level recommendations.

Global Thought Leadership and Industry Innovation

• Serve as a globally recognized authority and external thought leader in enterprise virtualization, hybrid infrastructure, resilient computing, cloud architecture, infrastructure automation, and related technologies.

• Originate innovative architectural approaches, reference models, and technology strategies that materially advance enterprise capabilities and address challenges for which accepted industry practices or existing solutions are insufficient.

• Develop solutions from first principles for the organization’s most complex and unprecedented infrastructure and business challenges.

• Represent the organization in strategic vendor councils, industry bodies, professional forums, and executive technology communities.

• Influence industry practices and the strategic roadmaps of major technology providers based on the organization’s complex global business, fleet, and operating requirements.

Global Infrastructure Transformation and Technical Leadership

• Lead the organization’s largest, most strategically significant, and technically complex multidisciplinary infrastructure transformation initiatives.

• Direct programs spanning global shoreside and fleet operations, data centers, cloud platforms, cybersecurity, application ecosystems, network services, engineering, and business operations.

• Establish architecture direction, decision rights, risk parameters, success measures, and technical priorities for global infrastructure transformation programs.

• Maintain enterprise accountability for architectural outcomes that materially affect global business continuity, operational resilience, cybersecurity posture, guest-facing services, technology risk, and long-term investment.

• Provide enterprise-wide technical leadership, establish direction for senior architects and engineers, and align executive stakeholders, technology leaders, vendors, and external partners around a unified architecture strategy.

• Anticipate emerging business and technology requirements and initiate transformation strategies before existing platforms or practices constrain organizational performance, innovation, or growth.

Infrastructure, Cloud, Security, and Resilience Architecture

• Define and govern the global architecture for enterprise virtualization, compute, server, storage, converged and hyper-converged platforms, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and globally distributed infrastructure environments.

• Establish enterprise standards for workload placement, cloud adoption, connectivity, portability, platform lifecycle management, performance, capacity, high availability, disaster recovery, and workload mobility across shoreside and fleet environments.

• Determine strategic platform direction based on business criticality, performance, scalability, reliability, cybersecurity, regulatory requirements, resilience, lifecycle considerations, and total cost.

• Define the architectural control framework required to meet Zero Trust, identity, network segmentation, secure virtualization, platform-hardening, audit, data-protection, and business-continuity obligations.

• Exercise architectural authority over infrastructure-related security and resilience decisions with material enterprise impact and ensure the continuity and recovery of mission-critical guest-facing, operational, and corporate services.

• Anticipate emerging cyber, regulatory, operational, and technology risks and determine the required enterprise architecture response.

Automation, Strategic Partnerships, and Organizational Influence

• Establish the enterprise automation, infrastructure-as-code, self-service, configuration-management, orchestration, and platform-engineering strategy.

• Define architectural standards for Terraform, Ansible, PowerShell, Python, GitOps, policy-driven automation, and related technologies.

• Originate reusable enterprise platforms and architecture patterns that reduce operational complexity, improve reliability, strengthen security, accelerate delivery, and support global shoreside and fleet environments.

• Direct the technical evaluation of strategic vendors, platforms, partnerships, and sourcing decisions, balancing business value, architectural integrity, operational resilience, financial impact, and long-term technology risk.

• Influence vendor product strategies and technology roadmaps and establish the technical requirements governing strategic enterprise technology partnerships.

• Serve as a trusted advisor to executive leadership, mentor senior technical professionals, and develop enterprise architecture capability across multiple infrastructure disciplines.

Knowledge & Skills:

• Scope: The Principal Enterprise Architect, Infrastructure Virtualized Solutions has global, enterprise-wide accountability for defining and governing the strategic architecture of virtualized compute, storage, private and public cloud, resilient fleet infrastructure, workload mobility, disaster recovery, and infrastructure automation. The role’s authority extends across Princess shoreside and fleet operations and interconnected enterprise technology environments where architectural decisions have significant implications for global operations, business continuity, cybersecurity, guest experience, capital investment, operational performance, and enterprise risk. The role operates across multiple technology and business disciplines and has few comparable technical peers within the organization. It establishes architecture principles, standards, and decision frameworks that govern the work of engineering, operations, cybersecurity, cloud, application, data, and delivery teams. The role shapes strategic technology partnerships and influences the long-range product and service roadmaps of key infrastructure vendors. Solutions and standards established by the role affect the organization’s most critical services and form the technology foundation for future business growth, fleet expansion, modernization, and new digital capabilities.

• Problem Solving: The role solves the organization’s most complex, ambiguous, and unprecedented infrastructure and business problems, including challenges for which accepted industry practices, established technologies, or internal precedents do not provide an adequate solution. The role develops original architectural approaches from first principles by integrating emerging technologies, business strategy, cybersecurity requirements, operational constraints, financial considerations, regulatory obligations, and long-range enterprise risk. The role anticipates systemic challenges before they materialize and determines the architectural response necessary to protect or advance the business. Problems addressed typically span multiple disciplines, business functions, geographies, fleet environments, technology ecosystems, and strategic vendors. Recommendations and decisions may establish new enterprise standards, materially alter infrastructure investment priorities, influence strategic vendor roadmaps, and advance accepted practices within the infrastructure architecture profession.

• Impact: The role has direct and significant impact on the management and strategic direction of the business. Its decisions establish the architecture foundation for global operations, business continuity, enterprise cybersecurity, technology investment, operational resilience, guest-facing services, and future growth. The role shapes enterprise infrastructure investment priorities and materially influences major capital and operating expenditure decisions. Architectural decisions may affect the organization’s global operating model, enterprise risk exposure, ability to introduce new business capabilities, and long-term competitiveness. The role leads the largest and most strategically significant infrastructure initiatives, with outcomes affecting complex global business operations. Innovations originated by the role are expected to create material enterprise value and influence the advancement of infrastructure practices beyond the organization.

• Leadership: The role provides enterprise-wide technical leadership and serves as the final architectural authority for the organization’s most complex, highest-risk, and most strategically significant infrastructure decisions. The role leads the largest global infrastructure programs and aligns senior technology leaders, engineering teams, cybersecurity professionals, application leaders, business executives, strategic vendors, and external partners around a unified architecture direction. The role advises executive leadership on business strategy, enterprise risk, technology investment, operational resilience, and emerging technologies. It influences decisions at the highest levels of the organization through recognized expertise, business judgment, external credibility, and strategic impact. The role establishes technical direction for senior architects and engineering leaders and develops enterprise capability by mentoring recognized experts across multiple infrastructure disciplines. It represents the organization externally as a thought leader and influences industry practices, professional standards, and strategic technology roadmaps.

For all roles:

• Knowledge: Understanding of workplace policies and procedures / Familiarity with team collaboration tools and techniques.

• Skills: Strong time management and organizational skills

• Abilities: Ability to maintain reliable and consistent attendance / Capacity to be punctual and meet deadlines / Ability to collaborate effectively with colleagues and work as part of a team / Demonstrated professionalism in all interactions and tasks..

Essential/Minimum Qualifications:

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a closely related discipline.

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or a related discipline preferred.

• Advanced professional architecture, cloud, infrastructure, cybersecurity, or technology leadership certifications preferred.

• Experience

• Minimum of 15 years of progressively responsible experience in enterprise infrastructure architecture and engineering.

• Extensive experience serving as a principal, chief, or enterprise architectural authority for complex, globally distributed, business-critical environments.

• Demonstrated experience defining and governing infrastructure architecture across international or global operations.

• Demonstrated record of originating and implementing major infrastructure innovations with impact beyond a single team, platform, business unit, or technology domain.

• Demonstrated experience leading the largest multidisciplinary technology transformations across complex international or global operations.

• Proven experience influencing executive business strategy, major investment decisions, strategic vendor direction, and long-range technology roadmaps.

• Experience supporting highly available, mission-critical operational and customer-facing environments.

• Experience developing original solutions for problems where established practices, technologies, or precedents are insufficient.

• Experience influencing technology practices across multiple functions, geographic locations, vendors, and operating environments

Technical Expertise/Compute & Virtualization

• VMware vSphere, NSX, vSAN

• Hyper-V

• Nutanix AHV

• Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops

• Kubernetes and OpenShift

• Storage

• Dell EMC

• Pure Storage

• NetApp

• HPE Storage Platforms

Networking

• Cisco

• Arista

• Palo Alto

• SD-WAN technologies

Cloud Platforms

• Azure

• AWS

• Hybrid cloud architecture

Operating Systems

• Windows Server

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux

• Ubuntu Linux

Automation

• Terraform

• Ansible

• PowerShell

• Python

• GitOps methodologies

Essential experience required:

• Leadership Competencies

• Global and enterprise strategic thinking

• External thought leadership

• Executive-level communication and influence

• Enterprise architecture governance

• Leadership of multidisciplinary global initiatives

• Influencing without formal authority

• Strategic stakeholder management

• Senior technical mentorship

• Decision-making under significant complexity and ambiguity

• Business and financial acumen

• Enterprise risk assessment

• Strategic vendor influence

• Innovation leadership

• Ability to originate solutions from first principles

• Ability to translate business strategy into technology capability

• Ability to establish alignment across diverse executive, technical, operational, and external stakeholders

• SUCCESS METRICS

• Enterprise infrastructure architecture enables the organization’s long-range business and technology strategy.

• Global infrastructure platforms achieve established availability, resilience, cybersecurity, performance, scalability, and recovery objectives.

• The organization’s largest infrastructure transformation initiatives deliver measurable business, operational, financial, and risk-management outcomes.

• Original architectural innovations materially improve enterprise capabilities and influence external industry or professional practices.

• Enterprise architecture standards are adopted consistently across shoreside, fleet, cloud, data-center, and strategic vendor environments.

• Infrastructure investment decisions demonstrate measurable alignment with business value, strategic priorities, financial sustainability, and enterprise risk.

• Operational complexity and technical debt are materially reduced through global standardization, automation, and platform engineering.

• Strategic vendors incorporate or respond to the organization’s requirements in their product and technology roadmaps.

• Executive leadership receives authoritative guidance that improves business strategy, technology investment, operational resilience, and enterprise risk decisions.

• The organization is recognized externally for leadership and innovation in secure, resilient, and globally distributed infrastructure architecture.

Travel: Less than 25% non-shipboard travel likely

Work Conditions:  Work primarily in a climate-controlled environment with minimal safety/health hazard potential.

Physical Demands: Work beyond normal business hours or on weekends may be required occasionally to support business needs, projects, or operations.

**This position is classified as “hybrid.”  As an in-office role, it requires employees to work from a designated Princess location Mondays through Thursdays.  On Fridays you can work from home.

Princess provides comprehensive and innovative benefits to meet your needs, including:

What You Can Expect

• Cruise and Travel Privileges for You and Your Family 
• Health Benefits 
• 401(k)  
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan  
• Training & Professional Development 
• Tuition & Professional Certification Reimbursement 
• Rewards & Incentives  

Our Culture… Stronger Together

Our highest responsibility and top priority is compliance, environmental protection and the health, safety and well-being of our guests, the people in the communities we touch and serve, and our shipboard and shoreside employees.  Please visit our site to learn more about our Culture Essentials, Corporate Vision Statement and our Core Values at: princess.com/en-us/company-information

Princess is an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. 

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)

Princess will provide reasonable accommodation with the application process, upon your request, as required to comply with applicable laws.  If you have a disability and require assistance in this application process, please contact careers@carnival.com. 

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