SeniorFull TimeENAfrica
The Role & Team:
The Principal Engineering Architect defines and governs the technical aspects of the product portfolio and underlying engineering platforms, ensuring that systems are scalable, secure, operable, and aligned with long-term product and business strategy. The role works closely in collaboration with the Chief Product Office which leads the overall architecture transformation to an AI-driven intelligence platform and defines the reference architecture for our digital north star, VistaOne.
The role acts as the senior architectural authority across engineering teams, translating strategic product and technology direction into architectural principles, reference designs, and technical guardrails. A key aspect of the role is enabling consistent architectural execution across engineering by working through a distributed network of software architects embedded within the various development domains. The Principal Engineering Architect provides direction, alignment, and architectural governance while team-level architects drive detailed design and implementation within their respective engineering domains.
Success in this role is defined by the organization’s ability to deliver complex technical solution capabilities predictably and at scale, while maintaining architectural coherence across teams. Effective performance results in systems that are resilient in production, economically scalable in cloud environments, and maintainable over time. It also manifests through reduced systemic technical debt, faster industrialization of new capabilities from research and innovation, and strong alignment between product strategy, engineering execution, platform capabilities, security and operational requirements.
The role includes management and internal product ownership for a development team working on cross-portfolio components including the agentic framework VistaAI and the Infovista Cloud Platform, a shared product platform.
Key Responsibilities:
Technical Leadership
Maintain long-term technical strategy and ensure it is aligned with the portfolio reference architecture.
Identify, track, and manage portfolio-level technical debt impacting scalability, maintainability, or reliability.
Evaluate emerging technologies and translate innovation initiatives into a path to build.
Support engineering teams in resolving complex technical trade-offs and design decisions.
Architecture Governance
Establish architectural assets, principles, standards, and reference patterns that guide engineering teams.
Ownership of the architecture process within engineering, including representation in the ARB.
Coordinate and execute architectural work through architects embedded within development teams.
Provide technical oversight for major product capabilities and cross-system integrations.
Product Ownership
Internal product owner for VistaOne, our network & CX intelligence platform
Internal product owner for VistaAI, the underlying agentic AI-framework
Internal product owner for Infovista Cloud Platform (ICP), a shared product platform
Interface with Platforms
Align product architecture with onprem and cloud infrastructure capabilities and standards.
Define “golden paths” for teams consuming shared platform services and promote consistent use
Collaborate with internal platform teams to evolve shared infrastructure in line with product needs.
Interface with Operations and SRE
Ensure architecture supports operational requirements including availability, resilience, and observability.
Define architectural patterns supporting service level objectives (SLOs) and service level agreements (SLAs).
Design systems with clear operational ownership and maintainability in mind.
Collaborate with SRE teams on recovery strategies, monitoring architecture and capacity planning
Participate in architectural analysis of major incidents and drive structural remediation.
Interface with Security & Compliance
Product-level security accountability, ensuring security-by-design principles are embedded in system designs.
Work with security and compliance stakeholders to ensure alignment with regulatory and industry requirements.
Qualifications:
MSc or BSc in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline.
10–15 years of experience in software engineering
Implementing distributed real-time data-processing environments
Leading architecture governance across multi-site engineering teams in complex product organizations.
Leading agile teams acting as product owner
Deep technical knowledge of:
-Cloud platforms and distributed systems
-Analytics, edge processing and BI pipelines
-API, microservice and integration architectures
-Generative AI / LLMs (OpenAI, LangChain, RAG, Agents, Vector DB’s, etc.)
-Observability and reliability engineering
-Secure software architecture
-Experience in telecom software environments advantageous
-Experience with MLOps & model lifecycle advantageous
