First Student is a leading provider of student transportation solutions, dedicated to ensuring safe and efficient transportation for students. Our commitment to innovation has led us to pioneer electric school buses and to build and continuously refine a substantial portfolio of custom digital products on AWS - spanning the customer-facing experiences families and school districts rely on and the internal platforms that run our operations. As we modernize the industry - increasingly through cloud-native architecture and the responsible adoption of autonomous, agent-based systems - we are seeking a Principal Enterprise Architect to build and keep coherent the technical foundation of that transformation.
Job Summary
The Principal Enterprise Architect is the senior individual-contributor authority on enterprise architecture at First Student. This is a hands-on, building role rather than a people-leadership or review role: influence is earned through technical depth, working artifacts, and the ability to turn complex, cross-functional designs into coherent architecture teams can actually build on. The role carries an enterprise-wide remit and concentrates on the problems of greatest consequence to the business.
At the center of that remit is First Student's portfolio of custom digital products - purpose-built software serving both customers and internal operations, built and continuously refined on AWS. Two emerging areas receive particular emphasis: cloud architecture on AWS, and the architecture enabling First Student's move toward agent-based, autonomous software development. These are one connected strategy, and this role is central to building and keeping it coherent.
Key Responsibilities
Enterprise Architecture Authority: Serve as the enterprise-wide architectural authority across the First Student technology estate. Operate as a contributor within a collaborative design process involving senior leaders, engineering managers, and the cloud architect, and act as the individual who synthesizes competing inputs into a coherent target architecture and builds the connective scaffolding that makes it real. Concentrate effort on the problems of greatest enterprise consequence.
Custom Digital Product Architecture: Own the architecture for First Student's portfolio of custom-built digital products - the parent app, school-district and customer-facing applications, and the platforms behind payroll, driver, operations, routing, and scheduling. Lead the biggest architectural problems, design challenges, and integrations across these products, and build the shared scaffolds and reference implementations that let product teams ship against a coherent whole rather than reinvent it.
Shared Digital Services & Integration Architecture: Design and stand up First Student's "Shared Digital Services" and enterprise integration layer - delivering the connective fabric as reusable, self-service capabilities teams adopt rather than request, so that custom products share data and backend functions cleanly and consistently across the landscape.
Cloud Architecture (AWS): Own and build the cloud paved road on AWS - reference implementations, landing zones, and golden paths teams ship on, not standards documents they are audited against. Build a dynamic cloud environment defined by automated, rule-based, and progressively-provisioned access, designed so that autonomous agents operate independently and safely within it. Product implementation and cloud spend are owned by delivery teams; the paved road they build on is owned and built here.
Agentic & Autonomous Software Development: Design, prototype, and harden the guardrail layer for First Student's emerging agent-based software development lifecycle - agent runtime patterns, control-plane scaffolds, and the eval, supervision, and observability substrate that keeps autonomous systems in bounds. Make the safe path the fast path, so teams have no incentive to route around it. Do this as a key contributor inside the group design process, not as a downstream approver.
Security & Compliance by Design: Partner closely with the Senior Director of Cybersecurity and their team - who own risk assessment - to encode security, privacy, and regulatory requirements into the paved road as policy-as-code and safe defaults, so obligations attached to student and driver data, including FERPA and applicable privacy laws, are inherited by construction rather than enforced by review - particularly as autonomous agents and dynamic access provisioning expand the surface that must remain compliant.
Architecture Governance & Standards: Encode architecture principles and patterns into reusable scaffolds, golden paths, and automated checks that make the right way the easy way. Reserve formal review and sign-off for genuinely irreversible (Type 1) decisions; let reversible work run on guardrails, not gates. Drive adoption by making the standard path the lowest-friction path.
Cross-Functional Collaboration & Strategic Alignment: Collaborate with senior leadership, VPs, engineering managers, and the cloud architect to translate business goals into architecture, surface dependencies early, and flag where team and system boundaries need to move together. Communicate the architectural direction clearly to both technical and executive audiences.
Emerging Technology Assessment: Continuously evaluate emerging technologies and trends relevant to student transportation and to First Student's cloud and agentic direction - including EV technology, IoT, cloud-native patterns, and frontier AI. Pilot, prototype, and recommend where and how new capabilities should be adopted, while remaining deliberately agile as the underlying tooling evolves.
Operating-Model & Team-Topology Architecture: Design team boundaries and interaction modes so the organization's structure produces the loosely-coupled, fast-iterating architecture the strategy requires (inverse Conway). Treat team design as an architecture surface, not an afterthought.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree.
- 8+ years of enterprise architecture experience, with demonstrated depth and breadth across multiple IT domains.
- Proven experience architecting and integrating significant, large-scale custom software products - both customer-facing and internal - including the challenge of making a portfolio of distinct products operate as a coherent whole.
- Demonstrable, hands-on experience designing or architecting with AI and agent-based systems. Because the field is new, this is not measured in years - but it must be real, current, and applied. This role is for someone already doing the work, not for a strong generalist who has yet to touch AI.
- Deep AWS cloud architecture experience, including reference architectures, landing zones, well-architected design, and automated or dynamic provisioning.
- A proven ability to turn complex, multi-stakeholder designs into coherent architecture, and to build the scaffolding that makes it adoptable.
- Learning agility - a clear track record of rapidly mastering, and re-architecting around, fast-moving technologies and tooling.
- Strong business acumen, with the ability to translate architecture into business terms and to focus effort where it matters most.
- Excellent communication and influence skills, with the ability to lead through expertise rather than positional authority.
- Familiarity with architecture frameworks (e.g., TOGAF, Zachman, FEAF) as practical tools, and modern delivery and quality practices (Agile/Scrum, ITIL). TOGAF certification a plus.
- AWS certification (e.g., Solutions Architect - Professional) a plus.
- Experience with EV technology, IoT, digital platforms, and on-bus technology solutions is highly desirable.
Compensation ranges from $130,000 - $180,000 depending on experience.
First for a reason:
At First Student, we are a family of 60,000+ employees who take pride in safely transporting more than 5 million students and passengers to and from their destinations each day! Our family of brands include Transco, Total Transportation, Maggies Paratransit, and GVC II. Our employees are at the forefront of safety and innovation; they create and implement the most advanced training and technology the transportation industry has to offer.
In the state of Washington, all technician and driving positions, including but not limited to van drivers and any other position requiring employees to drive a company-owned vehicle, are considered safety-sensitive and are therefore subject to drug and alcohol testing, including cannabis.
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status. First is also committed to providing a drug-free workplace. First will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Los Angeles Fair Chance Ordinance, and any other fair chance law. Philadelphia's Fair Criminal Record Screening Standards Ordinance Poster is at this link or upon request https://www.phila.gov/media/20210423160847/Fair-Chance-Hiring-law-poster.pdf.
