Architect - Staff Software Engineer

Wakacje.pl is the largest e-commerce platform in Poland and a network of travel agencies offering a wide range of travel products. It is part of Wirtualna Polska Holding since 2015, the largest Polish group of media and e-commerce companies. The IT team consists of over 100 specialists including Developers, DevOps Engineers, Testers, Project Managers, Architects, and Analysts, working in a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).

• Minimum 8 years hands-on software engineering experience, including at least 3 years in architecture or principal engineering roles.
• Proven experience owning end-to-end architecture for cross-cutting or platform domains.
• Expertise in designing and evolving distributed systems at scale, including service boundaries, integration patterns, event-driven architectures, and API design.
• Skilled in producing and maintaining architectural documentation such as C4 models, ADRs, ERDs, and sequence diagrams.
• Experience defining and enforcing engineering standards with measurable adoption results.
• Ability to engage non-technical stakeholders and translate business intent into technical requirements.
• Strong communication and influencing skills to drive architectural decisions without direct authority.
• Comfortable operating within governed multi-team environments and familiar with Architecture Boards and ADR practices.
• Familiarity with modern frontend architecture patterns including React, SSR, Next.js, and Backend for Frontend (BFF).

Nice to have:

• Experience with scaled agile frameworks (SAFe, LeSS) in principal engineering or architect roles.
• Hands-on experience with AI/ML systems including LLM integrations, RAG pipelines, and agentic workflows.
• Familiarity with travel, e-commerce, or marketplace platform architectures, particularly in search, booking, or payments.
• Experience in building or operating internal developer platforms and shared engineering toolchains.
• Background in maintaining technology radar, vendor evaluation frameworks, or engineering standards programs.
• Experience defining and operationalizing SLOs with instrumentation, alerting, and reliability reviews.

• Own the end-to-end architecture of an assigned system or customer journey step, maintaining current and target architecture and a sequenced roadmap.
• Produce and update architectural documentation including C4 models, Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), ERDs, and sequence diagrams.
• Serve on the Architecture Board as the decision authority, assessing proposals and managing escalations.
• Lead vendor and technology evaluations, validate team proposals, and recommend or block technology choices.
• Evaluate and drive adoption of AI patterns and maintain an inventory of AI components and their risk profiles.
• Engage with product, commercial, and operations stakeholders to translate business intent into technical requirements.
• Own and enforce engineering standards such as API design, observability, security baselines, and data handling.
• Define SLIs and SLOs, review breach trends, and collaborate on reliability improvement goals.
• Coordinate with other Architects to reduce integration debt and duplication.
• Teach architectural patterns, engineering standards, and AI guidelines across the organization.
• Provide technology and design input to Engineering Managers and teams on architecture decisions and major refactors.