Lead Architect

We are looking for a Lead Architect to own and govern the overall technical direction of Catena Media. This role is responsible for defining and aligning our architectural vision across departments and domains, ensuring our platforms, products, and capabilities support current and future business needs in a simple, value-driven way. 

You will bridge projects and teams across the organisation, working closely with technology and business stakeholders to create coherent, scalable, and cost-effective solutions. The ideal candidate combines broad technical expertise in enterprise systems, web, data, and software engineering with deep understanding of iGaming and the affiliate business model, and is recognised as both a mentor for technical leaders and a trusted advisor for the business. 

YOUR CHALLENGE: 

Own the overall technical architecture of Catena Media, defining the target state for platforms, systems, and integrations and guiding the organisation towards it through clear principles and roadmaps. 

Ensure cross-department architectural alignment, working with Engineering, Product, Marketing, Data, SEO, Analytics
and other teams so that solutions fit together into a cohesive ecosystem rather than isolated projects. 

Bridge communication between technology and business stakeholders by translating business strategy and objectives into pragmatic technical capabilities and architectural choices. Clearly explain technical trade-offs, set realistic expectations, and guide stakeholders towards options that maximise long-term value. 

Define and govern architecture standards and guidelines (patterns, integration approaches, data flows, security and compliance considerations, SLAs, quality attributes) and ensure they are understood and applied consistently. 

Provide architectural leadership on key initiatives that span multiple domains, such as platform consolidation, shared services, tracking and attribution, identity and consent, content platforms, and data/analytics capabilities. 

Act as a multiplier for technical leadership by coaching and developing Tech Leads and Engineering Managers, helping them make sound architectural decisions within their own domains. 

Facilitate architectural decision-making, running architecture reviews, design sessions and RFC processes that balance speed, quality, and risk, and ensure decisions are documented and communicated. 

Champion simple, value-driven solutions, avoiding unnecessary complexity, preferring incremental evolution over big-bang rewrites, and focusing on measurable business outcomes. 

Maintain a broad technical view of our ecosystem, understanding how web platforms, backend services, data pipelines, tracking, integrations, and third-party tools fit together end-to-end. Collaborate closely with data and analytics teams to ensure data is modelled, collected, and exposed in ways that enable performance tracking, experimentation, and business insights.
Promote a culture of technical excellence and
continuous learning, encouraging experimentation and innovation where it adds value, knowledge sharing across teams, and continuous improvement of our architecture and engineering practices. 

Maintain a passion for continuous learning and knowledge sharing, staying informed on industry trends in iGaming, affiliate marketing, martech, adtech, SEO, and analytics. Proactively bring relevant innovations into architectural practice and raise the technical bar across the organisation. 

TO DO IT, YOU WILL NEED: 

Proven experience in a senior architecture role (Lead Architect, Head of Architecture, or similar) in a multi-team, multi-product environment. 

Demonstrate a broad technical background spanning enterprise and distributed systems, modern web architectures, data platforms and engineering, integrations, APIs, and event-driven/service-oriented architectures. Apply strong grounding in architecture disciplines including system design, integration patterns, domain-driven thinking, scalability, performance, reliability, security, and compliance. 

Deep knowledge of iGaming, particularly the affiliate business model – how traffic, tracking, attribution, revenue share, CPA and hybrid deals work end to end. 

Experience in a similar role at an iGaming affiliate or operator is a strong plus. 

Ability to see the bigger picture, connecting individual projects into a coherent platform and making trade-offs that optimise for long-term business value. 

Comfortable working with a tech stack that includes modern web technologies, backend services and data platforms (e.g. React/Next.js, Node.js/NestJS, PostgreSQL, Redis, queues, AWS, Cloudflare, WordPress or similar).  

Familiarity with DevOps practices (CI/CD, observability, Infrastructure-as-Code, cloud-native architectures) and how they influence architectural choices. 

Strong understanding of data flows in an affiliate context: tracking, tagging, event collection, identity and consent, reporting and dashboards. 

Demonstrate excellent communication and mentoring skills, influencing and aligning senior stakeholders across technology and business. Mentor technical leaders to grow their architectural judgement and leadership, deep-dive with engineers on technical trade-offs, and present clear, concise recommendations to non-technical stakeholders. 

A pragmatic, value-first mindset: you seek the simplest solution that delivers the needed outcome and can evolve over time. 

Bias towards incremental improvement over perfection, while still protecting long-term architectural health. 

Ownership mentality: you care about the overall success of Catena Media’s platforms, not just individual systems.