Architect Staff Software Engineer

• 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.
• Hands-on experience evolving legacy software at scale, from refactoring and performance optimization to leading phased re-architecture toward modern, maintainable platforms.
• 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.

,[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. , 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., Treat AI as a default design ingredient — evaluate where AI patterns 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; serve as named DRI for at least one standard across the guild. Contribute reusable patterns and golden paths back to the wider engineering organization., 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., Actively teach architectural patterns, engineering standards, and AI guidelines across the organization — and measure adoption, not just publication., Provide technology and design input to Engineering Managers and teams on architecture decisions, integration patterns, and major refactors.] Requirements: Architecture, Distributed systems, Stakeholder management, Communication skills, Backend, SAFe, AI, API, E-commerce Tools: . Additionally: Private healthcare, Flexible working hours, Life insurance, Discounts, Free coffee, No dress code.