41544,
Description
Enterprise Architect, India
All About Us.
People empowering people.
At Symphony Talent, we're all about people—connecting, inspiring, and hiring them for jobs that transform their lives and our clients organizations.
Our human approach, synergistic technology, and brand solutions deliver the outcomes you care about - from reach to retention - by coordinating talent leaders and their teams and enabling them to improve and advance continually.
Symphony Talent supports more than 900 clients worldwide, including the world's leading brands. Its headquarters are in New York, London, Bangalore, and Belfast, with over 300 multinational employees.
All About The Role
As Enterprise Architect, you will define and own the enterprise-wide architectural vision and technology strategy for Symphony Talent. You will lead the architecture for new product capabilities and platforms — selecting the right tools, technologies, and patterns, setting standards and governance practices, and shaping the long-term technology roadmap that guides Principal Architects, Technical Architects, and engineering leaders. Even where Principal Architects own the architecture for specific initiatives, you serve as the senior reviewing voice, ensuring consistency, quality, and alignment across the enterprise. You will also drive technology rationalization and vendor strategy — consolidating overlapping tools, evaluating build-vs-buy trade-offs, and ensuring the technology landscape remains coherent, cost-effective, and future-ready.
A core priority of this role is driving AI-assisted engineering at scale — establishing the practices, tools, and guardrails that enable every engineering team to leverage AI in how they design, build, test, and maintain software. You will also identify high-impact AI opportunities across products and ensure responsible AI design and governance.
While most of your time will go into architecture, governance, and elevating other architects, you are expected to remain hands-on when the situation demands it — whether that means diving into code, leading critical reviews, or prototyping to validate key architectural decisions. You will partner with senior business and engineering leaders to align architecture with business strategy, evaluate emerging technologies, and ensure Symphony Talent's platform stays modern, secure, scalable, and future-ready.
About The Role
Enterprise Architecture & Technology Strategy
- Define and own the enterprise-wide architectural vision and technology roadmap across the entire product portfolio.
- Establish and govern architecture principles, standards, patterns, and reference architectures that guide engineering across all product lines.
- Lead architecture for new product capabilities and platforms — making the foundational decisions on tools, technologies, and patterns.
- Serve as the senior reviewing voice for architectural decisions made by Principal and Technical Architects; ensure consistency, quality, and alignment across the enterprise.
- Apply enterprise architecture frameworks to drive structured decision-making and governance.
Technology Rationalization & Vendor Strategy
- Drive consolidation of overlapping tools, platforms, and frameworks across the organization to reduce complexity and cost.
- Lead build-vs-buy evaluations for major technology decisions, balancing speed, cost, capability, and long-term sustainability.
- Evaluate and recommend vendors, platforms, and partner technologies; own the technology selection narrative end-to-end.
- Ensure the technology landscape remains coherent, cost-effective, secure, and future-ready.
AI Strategy & AI-Assisted Engineering
- Drive enterprise-wide adoption of AI-assisted engineering — establishing practices, tools, and guardrails for using AI across design, development, testing, documentation, and operations.
- Identify and prioritize high-impact AI opportunities across the product portfolio (Generative AI, Agentic AI, RAG, intelligent automation).
- Architect scalable, responsible AI solution patterns including LLM integration, embeddings, vector databases, and prompt orchestration.
- Establish AI governance, security, and responsible-use standards across all engineering teams.
- Stay current with the AI landscape — LLM ecosystems, agent frameworks, AI infrastructure — and translate insights into enterprise direction.
Architectural Leadership & Mentorship
- Mentor and elevate Principal Architects, Technical Architects, and senior engineers; raise the architectural maturity bar across the organization.
- Lead architecture review forums, design councils, and cross-team technical decision-making.
- Remain hands-on when the situation demands it — diving into code, leading critical code and design reviews, and setting the bar for code quality and engineering rigor.
- Drive enterprise-wide adoption of best practices in DevOps, CI/CD, observability, and cloud- native engineering.
- Champion technical debt reduction, modernization, and platform reliability as ongoing programs, not one-time projects.
Business Alignment & Stakeholder Leadership
- Partner with senior business, product, and engineering leaders to align architecture and technology strategy with business goals.
- Translate business strategy into multi-year technology and architecture roadmaps; clearly communicate trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
- Represent the technology organization in strategic forums and influence enterprise-wide decisions on technology investment.
- Evaluate emerging technologies and bring forward proposals that create business advantage.
Requirements
Required Skills & Experience
Must-Have
Experience & Education
- 15+ years of overall software engineering experience, with 4+ years at Principal Architect, Sr. Architect, or Enterprise Architect level.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
- Proven track record of designing and governing large-scale distributed systems in production.
- Demonstrated experience operating in product-based or SaaS organizations delivering at enterprise scale.
- Experience working in global, distributed engineering environments across multiple time zones.
Architectural Leadership & Governance
- Demonstrated experience setting enterprise-wide architectural standards, principles, and reference architectures.
- Experience leading architecture review forums, design councils, or governance bodies across multiple product lines or business units.
- Track record of mentoring Principal/Senior Architects and elevating architectural maturity across organizations.
- Familiarity with enterprise architecture frameworks and structured decision-making methods.
- Experience driving technology rationalization (tool/platform consolidation) and vendor evaluations (build-vs-buy decisions).
Core Technical Stack
- Deep expertise in Java and the Spring / Spring Boot ecosystem as a primary foundation.
- Strong architectural capability across modern backend ecosystems — Python (FastAPI/Django), Node.js, microservices, RESTful APIs, event-driven systems (Kafka, JMS), and integration frameworks.
- Architectural awareness of frontend ecosystems — React, Angular — sufficient to make full- stack decisions.
- Hands-on capability to dive into code, lead code/design reviews, and prototype when architectural decisions require it.
Cloud, Infrastructure & Engineering Practices
- Strong experience architecting on AWS (preferred); working knowledge of Azure or GCP.
- Deep understanding of cloud-native patterns — serverless, containers (Docker), Kubernetes, service mesh.
- Experience setting standards for CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, DevOps maturity, and observability across engineering teams.
- Strong grasp of non-functional requirements at enterprise scale — scalability, availability, performance, security, compliance, resilience, and cost efficiency.
Data Architecture
- Proficiency with RDBMS (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL systems (MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB).
- Understanding of data architecture patterns at scale — data modeling, partitioning, replication, and event-sourced/streaming data systems.
AI-Assisted Engineering
- Hands-on familiarity with AI-assisted development tools (code copilots, AI testing assistants, AI documentation tools) and demonstrated experience driving their adoption across teams.
Stakeholder & Business Skills
- Experience partnering with senior business, product, and engineering leadership to align technology strategy with business goals.
- Strong communication and presentation skills with the ability to clearly articulate technical strategy and trade-offs to non-technical executives.
Good-to-Have
- Strong architectural understanding of AI solution patterns — GenAI, LLM integration, embeddings, vector databases, RAG, and agentic workflows.
- Awareness of responsible AI principles — governance, security, data privacy, and ethical considerations in AI design.
- Hands-on experience building or integrating AI-powered SaaS platforms in production.
- Exposure to Databricks or similar modern data/AI platforms.
- Experience with domain-driven design (DDD) and event-storming techniques for complex domains.
- Exposure to platform engineering initiatives (internal developer platforms, golden paths, paved roads).
- Experience with API management, service mesh (Istio, Linkerd), and modern API security patterns (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT).
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate or Professional) or equivalent senior cloud certifications.
- Experience contributing to technology investment decisions or representing engineering in board-level discussions.
- Public speaking, technical writing, or open-source contributions on architecture or AI topics.
Preferred Background
- Experience at a B2B or B2C product / SaaS company delivering software at enterprise scale.
- Prior experience in enterprise SaaS, HCM, or talent acquisition is a plus.
What We're Looking For
- Strategic thinker — You connect technology decisions to business outcomes and reason in multi-year horizons, not just sprints or quarters.
- Pragmatic decision-maker — You make sound, data-driven trade-offs between speed, quality, cost, complexity, and long-term sustainability, and clearly communicate the reasoning.
- Influential without authority — You shape decisions across the organization through frameworks, mentorship, and persuasion, not through hierarchy.
- Hands-on when it counts — You stay technical enough to dive into code, lead critical reviews, and earn credibility with engineers — while spending most of your time at the architecture and strategy layer.
- Strong sense of ownership — You hold yourself accountable for architectural outcomes across the enterprise, not just within your direct sphere of influence.
- Clear communicator — You translate complex technical strategy into language that engineers, product leaders, and business executives can all act on.
- Comfortable with ambiguity — You shape direction in fast-moving environments with incomplete information, especially around emerging technologies like AI.
- Curious and learning-agile — You actively explore emerging technologies, particularly AI, and translate insights into enterprise-relevant direction.
- Architect of architects — You raise the bar for other architects through mentorship, design reviews, and a culture of architectural excellence.
Additional Benefits
- Competitive salary
- Hybrid work arrangement
- Comprehensive insurance coverage and benefits
- Open and inclusive work culture
- Annual preventive health checkup benefit
- Complimentary lunch on work-from-office days
- Monthly fun activities
This position is based in our Bangalore/Noida office (Hybrid working model).
Inspired by our people-led mission to advance the future of candidates and companies Apply now, and let's make an impact together at Symphony Talent.
