Platform Architect

Job Description

We are seeking an experienced Platform Architect to shape, govern, and continuously evolve the platform that underpins all current and future products. This is a senior, hands-on architecture role focused on platform coherence, composability, and long-term sustainability - not individual application design.

The Platform Architect is accountable for the clarity and quality of architectural decisions and for how architecture shows up in day-to-day delivery. This is not an ivory-tower role. Success is measured by clear decisions, lightweight governance, and architecture that teams actively use to move faster - rather than by documents alone.

Main Duties and Responsibilities

Platform Architecture & Strategy

• Define, own, and continuously evolve the target platform architecture for company's Vision, aligned with business strategy, product roadmaps, and long-term scalability goals.
• Establish and maintain clear architecture principles, standards, and guardrails across cloud, integration, data, security, and application layers.
• Ensure the platform remains composable, enabling autonomous product teams to build, deploy, and evolve services without tight coupling.
• Maintain and publish platform reference architectures that reflect real-world usage and guide day-to-day design decisions.

Architectural Decision-Making & Learning

• Design and own a lightweight Architectural Decision Record (ADR) approach, embedded into existing delivery tools and workflows.
• Ensure architectural decisions are explicit, documented, and can be revisited in time.
• Facilitate architectural trade-off discussions, helping teams converge on pragmatic decisions.
• Establish feedback loops to assess the impact of architectural decisions and evolve principles and standards based on learning.
• Foster a culture where architecture is treated as a shared learning system, not a compliance exercise.

Cloud, Integration & Data Foundations

• Design and govern cloud-native architectures leveraging Azure (or equivalent), containerisation, and event-driven patterns.
• Define integration standards and patterns (APIs, events, messaging) to enable interoperability between company's products, third-party systems, and legacy maritime platforms.
• Collaborate with data and product stakeholders to establish consistent data models, data ownership, and data flow principles across the platform.
• Ensure platform designs support scalability, resilience, observability, and operational excellence.

Architecture Governance & Enablement

• Act as the architectural authority for the platform, ensuring alignment with agreed principles while avoiding unnecessary delivery friction.
• Embed architecture touchpoints into product discovery, initiative shaping, planning, and cross-team initiatives.
• Establish and run a regular architecture review cadence focused on decision-making and learning, not sign-off.
• Continuously evolve governance mechanisms to remain lightweight, proportionate to risk, and scalable across teams.
• Actively identify and remove architectural processes that slow teams down without improving outcomes.

Technology Evolution & Risk Management

• Own the technology evolution roadmap for the platform, identifying modernization opportunities, technical debt, and emerging technologies.
• Proactively assess and mitigate architectural risks related to security, compliance, scalability, resilience, and operational complexity.
• Ensure platform architecture supports high availability, disaster recovery, and regulatory requirements relevant to a SaaS maritime platform.

Collaboration & Leadership

• Work closely with Product Management, Engineering, Security, DevOps, and Delivery leadership to ensure architectural decisions are understood, actionable, and aligned.
• Mentor senior engineers and architects, building a strong architectural community and shared ownership mindset.
• Influence without authority, helping teams align around common architectural intent.
• Act as a trusted technical advisor to senior stakeholders, translating complex architectural topics into clear business implications.

Skills and Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in software engineering and architecture roles, with demonstrated ownership of platform-level or enterprise-scale architectures.
• Proven experience designing and governing cloud-native, distributed systems in complex, regulated environments.
• Strong understanding of modern architectural patterns: microservices, event-driven architectures, APIs, domain-driven design, and platform engineering.
• Deep experience with cloud platforms (Azure preferred), container orchestration (Docker/Kubernetes), and CI/CD ecosystems.
• Solid understanding of identity, access management, security-by-design, and compliance considerations in SaaS platforms.
• Strong understanding of Agile and product-centric delivery models in multi-team environments.
• Proven ability to design architecture that enables team autonomy while maintaining overall system coherence.
• Pragmatic decision-maker, comfortable making trade-offs between ideal architecture and delivery constraints.
• Skilled facilitator of technical discussions and decision-making across diverse stakeholders.