Architect - Staff Software Engineer

Who we are looking for?

Solutions Architects form a guild that provides end-to-end architectural coverage across our systems and customer journey steps. Each Architect owns a defined slice — a system (e.g., search, booking, payments) or a journey step (e.g., checkout, post-booking) — and is the named technical authority for that area. Together, the guild ensures every critical part of our 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 (new language, cloud provider, database engine, or TCO > €50k over 3 years) to the CTO.

• Treat AI as a default design ingredient — evaluate where AI patterns (copilots, agentic workflows, RAG, model-backed features) create leverage, drive their adoption, and maintain a clear 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 for tickets.

• Own and enforce engineering standards within the slice (API design, observability, security baselines, data handling, AI usage); serve as named DRI for at least one standard across the guild. Contribute reusable patterns and golden paths back 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. Does not own delivery timelines, headcount, sprint planning, or on-call rotations — those remain with Engineering Management.

Requirements:

• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with 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 — infrastructure, observability, developer platforms, shared services, or similar.

• Deep experience designing and evolving distributed systems at scale: service boundaries, integration patterns, event-driven architectures, and API design.

• Ability to produce and maintain living architectural documentation — C4 models, ADRs, ERDs, sequence diagrams — and hold others to the same standard.

• Experience defining and enforcing engineering standards across multiple teams, with measurable adoption outcomes rather than just published guidelines.

• Demonstrable ability to engage non-technical stakeholders — product, commercial, operations — and translate business intent into concrete technical requirements and trade-offs.

• Strong communication and influencing skills: able to drive architectural decisions through persuasion and documented rationale, without direct line authority over engineers.

• Comfort operating in a governed, multi-team environment — experienced with 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 (SAFe, LeSS, or similar) in a principal engineering or architect capacity.

• Hands-on experience designing or productionising AI/ML systems — 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.