Portfolio Architect

About this opportunity:   

Reporting to the Senior Manager Architecture, the Portfolio Architect will bring expertise in the oil and gas industry and a practical understanding of upstream business capabilities, processes, and technology. This role works at the intersection of business strategy, portfolio planning, and technology architecture, helping business and IT leaders translate priorities into coherent strategic roadmaps and executable initiatives.

The role will provide strategic oversight across a portfolio of business capabilities, applications, data, integrations, and technology services. The roles focus will be to simplify the landscape, consolidate overlapping capabilities, optimize investments, reduce technical debt and risk, and ensure that near-term initiatives advance a clear long-term direction.

What you’ll do:  

• Partner with business unit leaders, portfolio owners, product teams, and IT stakeholders to understand upstream business priorities, operating challenges, capability gaps, and investment needs.
•  Work collaboratively with the architecture team and the business to develop and maintain strategic capability, application, data, integration, and technology roadmaps that connect business outcomes to sequenced initiatives.
• Provide strategic architecture oversight for portfolio initiatives, ensuring that project decisions align with enterprise direction, target-state roadmaps, security expectations, data strategy, and broader transformation priorities.
• Assess the portfolio landscape to identify opportunities to simplify, standardize, consolidate, modernize, retire, or optimize applications and technology services, while considering operational continuity and business value.
• Develop current-state and target-state views that show business capabilities, information flows, applications, integrations, technology dependencies, risks, and transition steps in a way that supports leadership decisions.
• Shape initiative scope and investment options by clarifying architectural implications, dependencies, trade-offs, reuse opportunities, and the impact of short-term decisions on the long-term portfolio.
• Apply architecture frameworks and methods, including relevant TOGAF concepts, in practical solutions that improve decision quality without creating unnecessary added work.
• Use hands-on discovery, technical investigation, vendor demonstrations, experiments, and focused proof-of-concepts where appropriate to validate feasibility, expose constraints, and understand how proposed solutions work in practice.
• Collaborate with solution, data, integration, security, cloud, infrastructure, and operational technology architects to ensure that portfolio direction is coherent across architecture domains.
• Create and maintain clear architecture artifacts such as principles, standards, reference architectures, capability maps, roadmaps, decision records, transition architectures, and portfolio recommendations.
• Monitor industry and technology trends relevant to oil and gas and upstream operations, assessing where emerging capabilities may improve safety, reliability, productivity, decision-making, or cost performance.
• Communicate architecture direction and recommendations to technical teams, business stakeholders, and senior leaders using concise, outcome-focused language.

Who you are: 

Our ideal candidate will have the following minimum requirements: 

• Must be legally entitled to work in Canada.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• Minimum 12 years' experience in architecture within the oil and gas industry.
• Experience in enterprise, portfolio, domain, or solution architecture, including responsibility for strategic roadmaps, target-state architecture, and investment or initiative alignment.
• Understanding of upstream business capabilities, operational context in upstream technology use, and general understanding of upstream value streams and areas, such as exploration, subsurface, geoscience, wells and drilling, production, reserves, field operations, maintenance, and enabling corporate functions.
• Broad technical expertise across applications, data, integration, cloud and infrastructure, cybersecurity, and modern digital platforms, with the ability to understand dependencies across these domains.
• Familiarity with TOGAF and other architecture practices, including capability-based planning, current-state and target-state architecture, transition planning, principles, standards, and architecture decision records.
• Demonstrated ability to develop strategic roadmaps with business and IT leaders and to translate those roadmaps into prioritized, sequenced initiatives.
• Experience assessing complex application and technology portfolios and developing recommendations to simplify, consolidate, modernize, optimize, or retire capabilities.
•  Hands-on and experimental mindset, with the technical confidence to investigate architectures, integrations, data flows, platform capabilities, and vendor solutions directly when deeper understanding is required.
• Strong analytical and systems-thinking skills, including the ability to connect business strategy, operating processes, information, technology, risk, and investment decisions.
• Proven ability to facilitate and communicate complex topics to all levels of stakeholders and build alignment and influence decisions.

We acknowledge the value of transferable skills and may consider equivalent combinations of experience and education should you not meet a specific requirement. 

Note: The application deadline for this position is 11:59 PM MT November 13, 2026.   

Cenovus was ranked one of Canada’s Best Employers in 2025. We’re committed to being an employer of choice in our industry by offering a competitive total rewards package and employee programs and rewarding career development opportunities. Learn more.   

If you require accessibility assistance to complete the on-line application or otherwise apply for an open position with Cenovus, its subsidiaries and affiliates, please email [email protected].

Who we are:

Ranked as one of Canada’s Best Employers in 2025, Cenovus is an integrated energy company headquartered in Calgary. We’re committed to maximizing value by developing our assets in a safe, responsible and cost-efficient manner. We operate in Canada, the United States and the Asia Pacific region. Our operations include oil sands projects in northern Alberta, thermal and conventional crude oil and natural gas projects across Western Canada, crude oil production offshore Newfoundland and Labrador and natural gas and liquids production offshore China and Indonesia. Cenovus’s downstream operations include upgrading, refining and marketing operations in Canada and the United States.

Find Cenovus on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. 

The Cenovus experience

Total rewards

We’re committed to being an employer of choice through competitive compensation and our comprehensive total rewards package, including:

• Paid vacation (including a flex day program for eligible staff)
• Health & dental benefits
• Substantial mental health coverage
• Life insurance
• Disability benefits
• Employee family assistance
• Virtual healthcare coverage

Our development philosophy

We foster a culture of continuous learning and development to support employees as they build meaningful careers. We offer a variety of employee development initiatives, including:

• Internal course offerings
• Education assistance for additional development
• Opportunities to work on special projects
• Leadership development programs for emerging and established leaders

We actively promote internal job movement, recognizing the value of gaining new perspectives, building connections across teams, and applying expertise in new ways. As a fully integrated energy company, we believe that sharing knowledge across our business and operations creates stronger outcomes—for employees and for the company as a whole.

Our culture

• Our purpose: We energize the world to make people’s lives better.
• Our values:
  • Protect what matters
  • Do it right
  • Make it better
  • Do it together

• Cenovus Cares: We believe in the power of purpose-driven work. Our Employee Giving and Volunteering Program, Cenovus Cares, connects our people to our purpose, inspiring action and elevating impact year-round.
  • Support causes you care about with volunteer opportunities in and outside of work.
  • Earn donation grants while volunteering (up to $1,000 per event).
  • Receive donation matching up to $10,000 annually.

• Staff resource groups: We have various staff resource groups to help ensure our people feel a sense of belonging and can grow and do their best work. These voluntary groups are employee-led and all groups are open to all staff in all locations.

Equal opportunity employer

We believe a workplace where everyone has merit-based opportunities to grow, achieve career aspirations and feel a sense of belonging benefits our people, our company and the regions where we live and work. We embrace and encourage different perspectives and approaches, which help us make better business decisions. We believe that through this approach, we can solve challenges, seize opportunities and unlock innovative solutions.

To achieve an unbiased and respectful workplace, individuals are evaluated based on qualifications, merit and abilities, and we encourage applications from all qualified candidates. We also acknowledge the value of transferrable skills and may consider equivalent combinations of experience and education should you not meet a specific requirement.

For more information about working at Cenovus, visit cenovus.com.

The requirements of this posting may be modified to support business needs. Title and compensation administration will be based on the skills and capabilities of the successful incumbent.

Interested in this opportunity? Click the Apply link.

If you are a CURRENT EMPLOYEE, please apply by going to our Internal Career Site.