Architect - Staff Software Engineer

Who we are looking for?

Solutions Architects form a guild that provides end-to-end architectural coverage across systems and customer journey steps. Each Architect owns a defined slice — a system (for example, search, booking, or payments) or a journey step (for example, checkout or post-booking) — and is the named technical authority for that area. Together, the guild ensures every critical part of the estate is owned, coherent, and moving toward a clear target state.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will set architectural direction, make and document decisions, and ensure those decisions are understood and adopted in practice — not just written down.

Key responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end architecture of an assigned system or customer journey step; maintain a current-state assessment, a target architecture, and a sequenced, costed roadmap between them.
• Produce and keep current all architectural documentation for the slice: C4 models (L1/L2), Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), ERDs, and sequence diagrams. Every material decision has a written rationale; undocumented architecture does not count.
• Sit on the Architecture Board as the named decision authority for the slice; assess incoming proposals, drive decisions proactively, surface cross-slice conflicts, and escalate choices with material cost or strategic impact.
• Lead vendor and technology evaluations; validate team proposals against the target architecture; recommend or block technology choices within the slice with documented rationale. Escalate major changes, including a new language, cloud provider, database engine, or TCO above €50k over three years, to the CTO.
• Treat AI as a default design ingredient; evaluate where AI patterns (copilots, agentic workflows, RAG, and model-backed features) create leverage, drive adoption, and maintain an inventory of AI components and their risk profiles. Ensure AI usage converges on sanctioned patterns and guardrails.
• Engage directly with product, commercial, and operations stakeholders to discover business intent before design begins. Translate business problems into technical requirements and trade-off frames; design for outcomes, not tickets.
• Own and enforce engineering standards within the slice, including API design, observability, security baselines, data handling, and AI usage; serve as named DRI for at least one standard across the guild. Contribute reusable patterns and golden paths to the wider engineering organisation.
• Define SLIs and SLOs for the slice, review breach trends, and partner with Engineering Managers on quarterly reliability improvement goals.
• Coordinate with adjacent Architects to eliminate seams, duplication, and integration debt across slices. Pair on cross-slice initiatives by default.
• Actively teach architectural patterns, engineering standards, and AI guidelines across the organisation — and measure adoption, not just publication.
• Provide technology and design input to Engineering Managers and teams on architecture decisions, integration patterns, and major refactors. The role does not own delivery timelines, headcount, sprint planning, or on-call rotations; these remain with Engineering Management.

Requirements

• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, including at least 3 years in an architecture or principal engineering role spanning multiple teams or systems.
• Proven track record of owning end-to-end architecture for cross-cutting or platform domains, such as infrastructure, observability, developer platforms, shared services, or similar.
• Deep experience designing and evolving distributed systems at scale, including service boundaries, integration patterns, event-driven architectures, and API design.
• Ability to produce and maintain living architectural documentation, including C4 models, ADRs, ERDs, and sequence diagrams, and hold others to the same standard.
• Experience defining and enforcing engineering standards across multiple teams, with measurable adoption outcomes rather than only published guidelines.
• Demonstrable ability to engage non-technical stakeholders in product, commercial, and operations functions and translate business intent into concrete technical requirements and trade-offs.
• Strong communication and influencing skills, with the ability to drive architectural decisions through persuasion and documented rationale without direct line authority over engineers.
• Comfort operating in a governed, multi-team environment, including Architecture Boards, decision-escalation paths, and structured ADR practices.
• Familiarity with modern frontend architecture patterns, including React, SSR, Next.js, and Backend for Frontend (BFF), sufficient to assess design decisions and engage credibly with frontend teams.

Nice to have

• Experience working within or adapting scaled agile frameworks, such as SAFe, LeSS, or similar, in a principal engineering or architect capacity.
• Hands-on experience designing or productionising AI/ML systems, including LLM integrations, RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, or model evaluation frameworks.
• Familiarity with travel, e-commerce, or marketplace platform architectures, particularly search, booking, or payments domains.
• Experience building or operating internal developer platforms, golden paths, or shared engineering toolchains adopted across a large engineering organisation.
• Background contributing to or maintaining a technology radar, vendor evaluation frameworks, or organisation-wide engineering standards programmes.
• Experience defining and operationalising SLOs at the platform level, including instrumentation, alerting, and reliability review cadences.