Software Architect – Orchestration and Automation Platform

Description
Position at Wind River
Architect – AI strategy, Automation and Lifecycle Management

Location: Walnut Creek, CA

• San Diego, CA
• Boston, MA
• Troy, MI

About Wind River
Wind River is a global leader in delivering software for mission-critical intelligent systems. For more than four decades, the company has pioneered software that powers billions of devices requiring the highest levels of security, safety, and reliability.

Wind River enables customers across telecommunications, automotive, aerospace, defense, industrial, and medical sectors to solve complex challenges on their journey toward the intelligent machine economy. Our technology powers NASA missions like Artemis I and the James Webb Space Telescope, and helps global telecom leaders such as Verizon and Vodafone operate the world's largest Open RAN networks.

If you thrive in a culture of innovation, customer impact, and technical excellence — grounded in a growth mindset and diversity of thought — join us as we shape the intelligent edge.

About The Opportunity
Wind River is driving the industry shift toward AI-enabled, fully automated edge infrastructure. This strategic architect role leads the vision for intelligent orchestration and closed-loop automation across telecom and enterprise environments.

You'll define how AI, data analytics, and policy-driven orchestration converge to deliver scalable, secure, and autonomous infrastructure—from the network core to the far edge. This is a high-impact, cross-functional leadership role guiding Wind River's automation strategy and influencing global standards.

YOUR ROLE

• Define and execute the AI and Orchestration Strategy for Wind River's Intelligent Edge portfolio, aligning with business objectives, customer needs, and emerging industry standards.
• Provide architectural leadership for the Conductor platform, ensuring delivery of a high-quality high quality orchestration and full life cycle management solution to the engineering teams.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives to embed AI-driven policy, observability, and decision-making into the orchestration and automation layer.
• Partner with product and architecture teams to ensure platform capabilities support closed-loop automation, model-driven operations, and zero-touch lifecycle management.
• Evaluate and influence technologies in AI operations (AIOps, MLOps, observability AI) to drive automation intelligence and operational efficiency.
• Guide roadmap alignment across Conductor, analytics frameworks, Cloud platform, and Wind River OS products, ensuring consistent strategic direction and design principles.
• Represent Wind River in AI-RAN, and open-source automation forums, shaping standards and partnerships that advance intelligent edge orchestration.
• Provide architectural mentorship and design oversight to ensure scalability, resilience, and security remain core to all automation and AI-enabled initiatives.

How You Will Contribute
Strategic Leadership

• Drive the long-term roadmap for AI-enabled orchestration and automation.
• Align internal engineering, product, and business teams around a unified Intelligent Edge strategy.
• Translate emerging trends in AI, observability, and policy-based control into actionable platform initiatives.

Technology & Architecture Influence

• Provide architectural guidance for distributed automation platforms (e.g., Conductor) while ensuring alignment with AI-driven evolution.
• Evaluate next-generation automation patterns including intent-based orchestration, digital twins, and autonomous network operations.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner closely with CTO office architects, data science teams, and VP-level peers to drive adoption of AI in orchestration workflows.
• Engage with key customers and partners to validate architectural direction and identify co-innovation opportunities.

External Thought Leadership

• Contribute to Wind River's presence in AI-RAN Alliance, ETSI, and open-source automation ecosystems.
• Publish and present thought leadership on intelligent orchestration, AI-Ops, and edge automation.

Required Experience

• Proven expertise in AI/ML-driven automation, orchestration frameworks, or distributed cloud operations.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes, OpenStack, and multi-cloud orchestration technologies.
• Familiarity with automation and declarative models (Argo CD, Terraform, TOSCA, ONAP, Cloudify, etc.).
• Demonstrated success translating business objectives into scalable, AI-enhanced automation architectures.
• Strong leadership and collaboration across geographically distributed teams.

Desirable Experience

• Exposure to infrastructure automation in the Telecom and Enterprise markets, AI-on-RAN / AI-for-RAN frameworks, or Edge AI deployments.
• Experience with AIOps, MLOps, and AI observability pipelines.
• Participation in open-source or standards communities (ETSI, O-RAN, CNCF, LF).
• Technical fluency in Python and cloud infrastructure APIs.

REPORTING LINE

Reports to: VP, Intelligent Edge in the CTO office

Works closely with: CTO Office, Architecture Team, Cloud and Analytics Product Leads

Benefits

• Flexible home office We offer the flexibility of a hybrid work schedule or 100% remote
• Named Top Workplace for the 8th year in a row
• 100% Employee covered Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance*
• Flexible Time Off policy* + 12 observed Holidays
• 401K with company match
• Health Savings Account (HSA) and Flexible Spending Account (FSA)
• Wellness Benefits through Unmind

Compensation
The annual base salary range for this role's listed grade level is $150,000 to $210,000 plus a bonus for Colorado, New York, and New Jersey residents, and $170,000 to $230,000 plus a bonus for SF Bay Area, Greater Seattle, NYC, and Washington, DC, residents. Salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of the education, experience, knowledge, skills, location, and abilities of the applicant, and equity with other team members. Employees in this role are also eligible for the following benefits in accordance with the terms of the Company's plans: health, dental, vision insurance, life insurance, flex time off, eligibility to enroll in 401k, and 12 paid holidays.

Applicant Privacy Notice
Your privacy is of the utmost importance to us. At Wind River, we strictly adhere to all applicable data privacy laws. Please review Wind River's Applicant Privacy Notice, which can be found here.