Enterprise Architect

Mission of the role:

Define and drive a coherent architectural direction across Northwave, ensuring that technology choices, platforms, systems, and decision-making processes align with business objectives and form a scalable, consistent and well-integrated whole.

Context:

Northwave is evolving its technology landscape to better support both:

• High-quality cybersecurity service delivery

• Efficient and reliable internal operations

Currently, responsibilities across IT and engineering are distributed across teams, with varying tools, processes, and priorities. This results not only in fragmentation of the technology landscape, but also in inconsistent decision-making and limited transparency in how architectural choices are made across teams.

This role is introduced to:

· Establish clear architectural direction and principles across Northwave, building on and aligning the expert input from technical leads, engineers, etc.

· Establish clear and consistent decision-making processes for architectural topics across teams

· Ensure coherence and consistency across platforms, systems, and integrations

· Bridge Northwave strategy and business objectives to engineering execution and technology choices

What success looks like (first 6–9 months):

· A clear and shared architectural vision is defined and understood across teams

· A set of practical architectural principles and standards is established and actively used

· Improved consistency and alignment in technology and platform decisions across teams

Reduced fragmentation through:

• Better integration and interoperability

• Clearer platform choices and boundaries

• An effective architecture forum is in place and functioning, with strong engagement from engineering leads

• Engineering teams are able to make better and more consistent design decisions independently

• Clear and consistent decision-making processes for architectural topics are defined and applied across teams

Key Responsibilities:

· Define architectural direction – Establish and communicate a clear architectural vision aligned with Northwave’s strategy and operational needs

· Set principles and standards – Define and maintain pragmatic architectural principles and guidelines that enable consistency without creating unnecessary bureaucracy

· Define and improve decision-making processes – Establish clear, transparent, and scalable ways of making architectural decisions across teams and forums

· Ensure platform coherence – Oversee the coherence of platforms, systems, and integrations, ensuring they work together as a unified landscape

· Lead the architecture forum – Facilitate alignment between lead engineers and stakeholders, ensuring architectural decisions are discussed, challenged, aligned, and clearly concluded

· Bridge strategy and execution – Translate business and operational needs into architectural direction, and ensure these are reflected in engineering decisions

· Guide key design decisions – Act as a sparring partner and key decision authority on major cross-team or high-impact design choices