Platform Architect (Lead) s📣 Job Ad

About the Role

Hays is seeking a highly experienced, hands-on Platform Architect / Tech Lead to join their team in Riyadh. This contract position requires a strong technical leader to guide the architecture and technical direction of enterprise digital platforms.

Role Overview

The successful candidate will be responsible for designing scalable and resilient platform solutions, providing technical guidance to engineering teams, and ensuring adherence to architecture standards. This role involves supporting the delivery of critical platform services, including APIs, integrations, payments, booking systems, digital channels, and AI-enabled capabilities. It is a hands-on position focused on solving complex technical challenges and driving platform modernization initiatives.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and lead the platform architecture strategy and target-state architecture.
• Design scalable, secure, resilient, and high-performing platform solutions.
• Govern architecture across APIs, integrations, microservices, and digital channels.
• Lead architecture for platform services such as payments, booking, digital identity, communications, and AI-enabled services.
• Review and approve solution designs, technical specifications, and implementation approaches.
• Define resilience and reliability standards, including failover, disaster recovery, retries, and circuit breakers.
• Establish observability standards, including monitoring, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting.
• Drive platform modernization and technical improvement initiatives.
• Collaborate closely with engineering teams on architecture, troubleshooting, integrations, and technical decision-making.
• Establish engineering standards, governance processes, and best practices.
• Ensure platform consistency, security, performance, reliability, and operational excellence.

Required Qualifications

• Over 10 years of software engineering experience.
• More than 3 years in a Platform Architect, Solution Architect, Technical Architect, or Tech Lead role.
• Strong experience with Microservices and Distributed Systems Architecture.
• Significant API and Integration Architecture experience.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, or GCP.
• Proven experience designing highly scalable and highly available systems.
• A solid understanding of resilience patterns and platform reliability.
• Experience with observability, monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks.
• Demonstrated hands-on technical leadership experience.
• Ability to review designs, guide engineering teams, and solve complex technical challenges.

Preferred Experience

• Payments platform experience.
• Booking platform experience.
• Experience with digital channels and customer-facing platforms.
• Familiarity with AI-enabled platforms, copilots, and intelligent automation.
• Experience within large enterprise or digital transformation environments.

Work Details

This is a contract role based in Riyadh.