Architect - Staff Software Engineer

About the Position

Explore. Engage. Enjoy

We are looking for an Architect - Staff Software Engineer to join Wakacje.pl, Poland's largest e-commerce platform in travel and a network of travel agencies. With 25 years of fulfilling travel dreams, we are part of Wirtualna Polska Holding, the largest Polish group of media and e-commerce companies. If you approach life with #ENERGY, value #HONESTY AND OPENNESS, focus on #CUSTOMER UNDERSTANDING and #COLLABORATION at work, carry out your tasks with high #EFFICIENCY and #RESPONSIBILITY, and want to play a key role in making us #INNOVATIVE – join us!

About the Company

We are a growing team of over 100 IT specialists, including Developers, DevOps Engineers, Testers, Project Managers, Architects, and Analysts. We're driven by passion and engagement and prioritize a culture of open communication. A commitment to high code quality, robust test automation, and efficient processes is at the core of what we do. We work in Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end architecture of an assigned system or customer journey step - maintain a current-state assessment, a target architecture, and a sequenced, costed roadmap between them.
• Produce and keep current all architectural documentation for the slice: C4 models (L1/L2), Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), ERDs, and sequence diagrams. Every material decision has a written rationale; undocumented architecture does not count.
• Sit on the Architecture Board as the named decision authority for the slice - assess incoming proposals, drive decisions proactively, surface cross-slice conflicts, and escalate choices with material cost or strategic impact.
• Lead vendor and technology evaluations; validate team proposals against the target architecture; recommend or block technology choices within the slice with documented rationale. Escalate major changes (new language, cloud provider, database engine, or TCO > €50k over 3 years) to the CTO.
• Treat AI as a default design ingredient - evaluate where AI patterns (copilots, agentic workflows, RAG, model-backed features) create leverage, drive their adoption, and maintain a clear inventory of AI components and their risk profiles. Ensure AI usage converges on sanctioned patterns and guardrails.
• Engage directly with product, commercial, and operations stakeholders to discover business intent before design begins. Translate business problems into technical requirements and trade-off frames - design for outcomes, not for tickets.
• Own and enforce engineering standards within the slice (API design, observability, security baselines, data handling, AI usage); serve as named DRI for at least one standard across the guild. Contribute reusable patterns and golden paths back to the wider engineering organisation.
• Define SLIs and SLOs for the slice, review breach trends, and partner with Engineering Managers on quarterly reliability improvement goals.
• Coordinate with adjacent Architects to eliminate seams, duplication, and integration debt across slices. Pair on cross-slice initiatives by default.
• Actively teach architectural patterns, engineering standards, and AI guidelines across the organisation - and measure adoption, not just publication.
• Provide technology and design input to Engineering Managers and teams on architecture decisions, integration patterns, and major refactors. Does not own delivery timelines, headcount, sprint planning, or on-call rotations - those remain with Engineering Management.

Requirements

• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in an architecture or principal engineering role spanning multiple teams or systems.
• Proven track record of owning end-to-end architecture for cross-cutting or platform domains - infrastructure, observability, developer platforms, shared services, or similar.
• Deep experience designing and evolving distributed systems at scale: service boundaries, integration patterns, event-driven architectures, and API design.
• Ability to produce and maintain living architectural documentation - C4 models, ADRs, ERDs, sequence diagrams - and hold others to the same standard.
• Experience defining and enforcing engineering standards across multiple teams, with measurable adoption outcomes rather than just published guidelines.
• Demonstrable ability to engage non-technical stakeholders - product, commercial, operations - and translate business intent into concrete technical requirements and trade-offs.
• Strong communication and influencing skills: able to drive architectural decisions through persuasion and documented rationale, without direct line authority over engineers.
• Comfort operating in a governed, multi-team environment - experienced with Architecture Boards, decision escalation paths, and structured ADR practices.
• Familiarity with modern frontend architecture patterns, including React, SSR, Next.js, and Backend for Frontend (BFF), sufficient to assess design decisions and engage credibly with frontend teams.

Nice to Have

• Experience working within or adapting scaled agile frameworks (SAFe, LeSS, or similar) in a principal engineering or architect capacity.
• Hands-on experience designing or productionising AI/ML systems - LLM integrations, RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, or model evaluation frameworks.
• Familiarity with travel, e-commerce, or marketplace platform architectures - particularly search, booking, or payments domains.
• Experience building or operating internal developer platforms, golden paths, or shared engineering toolchains adopted across a large engineering organisation.
• Background contributing to or maintaining a technology radar, vendor evaluation frameworks, or organisation-wide engineering standards programmes.
• Experience defining and operationalising SLOs at the platform level, including instrumentation, alerting, and reliability review cadences.

We Offer

• Workplace safety and comfort: Employment based on an employment contract or B2B, full support during the onboarding period under the supervision of an engaging leader/buddy.
• Business agency and agility: Real influence on business decisions, the ability to take initiatives and implement your ideas.
• Development within the organization: Individual Development Plan, participation in training courses and conferences to enhance professional competencies.
• All-inclusive for Employees: A benefits package that you can use according to your preferences – Lux Med medical care, Health and Life Insurance (PZU and Warta), Multisport card, shopping and lunch vouchers, and many other cafeteria offers available on the Worksmile platform, a training and webinar package supporting professional and personal development, discounts on our products for employees and their families, work in the hybrid model from one of the office: Alchemia office in Gdańsk, casual dress code.

Ready to join the team with a #travelmindset? We’re waiting for you!