Director, Application Strategy and Governance

Sandisk is seeking a Director, Application Strategy and Governance to support enterprise application architecture processes, the harmonization of IT process across all Enterprise Systems towers, and the governance and compliance framework that keeps the estate audit-ready. This is a horizontal role reporting to the VP, Enterprise Systems: it has no single application tower, and instead sets the architecture standards, process disciplines, and control environment that the ERP, HR, SCM and PLM, Consumer, Commercial, and Enterprise Finance towers all operate to. The role additionally serves as Chief of Staff to the VP, Enterprise Systems, running the operating rhythm of the organization: planning cycles, the investment portfolio, the executive reporting cadence, and the follow-through on leadership commitments. The successful candidate will combine genuine application depth in either SAP S/4HANA or Salesforce with the organizational discipline to make one standard way of working stick across a multi-tower, multi-geography organization.

Essential Job Duties and Responsibilities

Leadership & Strategic Management

• Own the multi-year enterprise application architecture roadmap across ERP, CRM, HR, SCM and PLM, Finance, and digital platforms, keeping it aligned to the business operating model working with individual tower owners.
• Serve as the senior architecture authority for Enterprise Systems, setting the standards that every tower designs, builds, and buys against.
• Act as a trusted peer and challenge function to the tower Directors and the Sr. Director, ERP, holding architectural and process consistency without owning their delivery accountability.

Chief of Staff to the VP, Enterprise Systems

• Run the operating rhythm of the Enterprise Systems organization: the leadership team meeting cadence, staff reviews, quarterly business reviews, and the annual planning and budget cycle.
• Own the single source of truth for organizational commitments: decisions taken, owners, due dates, and status, and drive closure on items that cross tower boundaries.
• Prepare executive-level materials for the VP, including CIO and executive staff reviews, board and audit committee inputs, and business partner updates, translating technical detail into business narrative.
• Coordinate the organization-wide KPI and OKR framework, consolidating tower metrics into a single performance view of delivery, run, cost, and risk.
• Act as a proxy for the VP in selected governance forums and cross-functional programs, representing position and escalating only genuine decisions.
• Drive special initiatives on behalf of the VP, including organizational design changes, sourcing and vendor consolidation, talent and capability planning, and post-split remediation work.

Enterprise Application Strategy

• Own the target application architecture and the application portfolio roadmap, including buy versus build versus configure decisions, platform rationalization, and retirement of redundant applications.
• Maintain the authoritative application portfolio and capability map, with ownership, lifecycle status, cost, business criticality, and technical health recorded for every application.
• Define the boundaries between core platforms, SAP S/4HANA, Salesforce, Workday, PLM, and planning, so that each business capability is delivered once, in the right system, and integrated rather than duplicated.
• Set the clean-core and low-customization principle across the estate: keep core platforms standard, extend on the platform side-by-side layer, and challenge every custom build against standard functionality.
• Own the enterprise data and integration architecture principles, including master data ownership, system-of-record definitions, interface standards, and API and event patterns.
• Evaluate emerging capability, including platform AI services and agentic automation, and define the guardrails for permitted data, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and model risk review before adoption.

IT Process Harmonization Across Towers

• Define and enforce one common way of working across all Enterprise Systems towers, covering demand intake, solution design, estimation, build, test, release, cutover, and hypercare.
• Standardize the software development lifecycle and change control process across onsite and offshore teams so that work is portable, reviewable, and delivered to a consistent quality bar regardless of tower or platform.
• Harmonize the shared service disciplines that cut across towers: incident and problem management, service levels, environment and release calendars, documentation standards, and knowledge management.
• Eliminate tower-by-tower variation in templates, artifacts, and tollgates, replacing bespoke local practice with a single catalogued, measurable operating standard.
• Establish the metrics that prove harmonization is real, including cycle time, first-time-right rate, defect leakage, estimate accuracy, and rework, and report them by tower.
• Lead the continuous improvement agenda, converting recurring manual effort into repeatable, catalogued services with defined turnaround times.

Governance, Design Authority & Standards

• Support the Enterprise Architecture Review Board and the design authority, standardizing cross-tower design decisions, integration patterns, and exceptions to standard.
• Own the architecture exception process, including the business case, risk acceptance, remediation plan, and expiry date for every approved deviation.
• Govern the demand and investment pipeline with Finance and the PMO, ensuring every request is assessed for architectural fit, duplication, compliance impact, and total cost of ownership before approval.
• Maintain the technical debt register across the estate, quantify it, and drive a funded reduction plan with the tower leaders.
• Publish and maintain the standards library: architecture principles, reference architectures, naming and design conventions, security requirements, and documentation templates.

Compliance, SOX & Risk Management

• Own the IT general controls environment for the Enterprise Systems estate, covering access management, change management, operations, and third-party controls.
• Lead SOX readiness and testing support end to end, partnering with Finance, Internal Audit, and external auditors, and close findings on committed schedules.
• Own the segregation of duties framework across core platforms, including ruleset maintenance, conflict remediation, mitigating controls, and emergency access governance.
• Govern user access reviews, privileged access, and provisioning and deprovisioning standards across the application estate.
• Ensure application compliance with data privacy, data residency, records retention, trade compliance, and customer and partner contractual obligations, in partnership with Legal and Security.
• Maintain the IT risk register for Enterprise Systems, with named owners, agreed mitigations, and visible escalation of accepted risk to the VP and executive stakeholders.
• Own audit evidence readiness as a continuous state rather than a periodic exercise, including current technical documentation, control narratives, and automated evidence collection where possible.

Supervisory Responsibilities

Direct Reports

• Hires, retains, trains, coaches, guides, directs, and develops direct reports (e.g., Managers, Enterprise Architects, Solution Architects, Process and Governance Leads, SOX and Compliance Analysts) using company-wide processes, policies, and resources.

Indirect Reports

• Provides architecture and process direction to tower architects, offshore delivery teams, vendor-supplied resources, and matrixed specialists across the enterprise, with authority over standards and quality oversight rather than line management.

Travel Requirements

• Travel up to 25% (Domestic and International)

Minimum Qualifications

Education Level

• Bachelor's degree, Master's degree, or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or a related field.

Field of Study/Area of Experience

• 12+ years of progressive IT experience, with at least 8+ years in enterprise or solution architecture, IT governance, or application leadership roles, including people leadership.
• Strong application bias is essential: deep, hands-on functional and technical depth in either SAP S/4HANA or Salesforce or custom applications, earned through delivery rather than advisory work, with working fluency across the wider enterprise application estate.
• Demonstrated ownership of an enterprise architecture function, including standards, reference architectures, a design authority or architecture review board, and an exception process with teeth.
• Proven track record harmonizing IT process across multiple application towers or business units, with measurable improvement in delivery consistency, cycle time, or quality.
• Direct experience owning IT general controls and SOX compliance for an enterprise application estate, including segregation of duties, access governance, and external audit support.
• Experience operating as a chief of staff, business manager, or equivalent to a senior technology executive, running planning cycles, executive reporting, and cross-organization follow-through.
• Experience governing a multi-vendor, blended onsite and offshore operating model to a consistent engineering and process standard.
• Experience in a publicly traded, global manufacturing or technology company, ideally one that has undergone a separation, merger, or large-scale ERP transformation.

Skills, Knowledge, and Abilities

• Credible with engineers and with executives: ability to work with technical details or prepare executive level communication.
• Strong architectural judgement, able to hold the line on standards while finding pragmatic paths to deliver business outcomes on time.
• Influence without authority, the defining requirement of this role: the ability to make peer tower leaders adopt a common standard because it is demonstrably better, not because it is mandated.
• High organizational discipline and follow-through, with the instinct to close loops, chase commitments, and keep a leadership team honest to its own decisions.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including executive-grade documents, board-level materials, and clear control narratives for auditors.
• Comfort with ambiguity and with building structure where none exists, including in organizations that have previously worked without governance discipline.
• Discretion and sound judgement in handling confidential organizational, financial, and personnel matters.
• Strong leadership in change management, mentorship, and continuous capability building.