Lead Enterprise Architect

Role: Solution / Enterprise Architect

Location : Warsaw or Krakow

Mode: Remote

Type: Contract

Job Description:

We are building a nearshore Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Poland and need a hands-on Solution / Enterprise Architect to lead it technically from day one. This is a bellwether role: the standard, delivery culture, and reputation of the CoE will be set by whoever holds it. You will personally build — prototypes, reference implementations, production solutions — while leading client conversations, acting as the region’s senior technical authority, and helping win business. Architect, builder, technical seller, and team-builder in one. The mandate centres on AI / agentic systems and product engineering.

WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS — THE COE MANDATE

1. First and most visible technical face of the CoE in Poland.
2. Sets the engineering practices, architecture principles, and quality bar the centre scales on.
3. Turns technical credibility into pipeline and won deals, alongside sales.
4. Recruits, mentors, and grows the founding engineering team.
5. Represents the CoE externally to build employer brand and attract senior talent.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Hands-on solutioning & building (core)

1. Build, not just advise — develop prototypes, reference implementations, and production components; stay close to the code.
2. Lead technical discovery, solution design, and architecture conversations with clients and prospects.
3. Act as senior technical decision-maker and escalation point across engagements.

AI & agentic architecture (core)

1. Design enterprise-scale GenAI and multi-agent systems end-to-end: UX, APIs, orchestration, models, infrastructure.
2. Architect agentic workflows (planner–executor–evaluator, MCP-style decomposition, A2A) with RAG, event-driven, and automation layers.
3. Exhibit deep understanding of agent lifecycle governance: registry, versioning, evaluation, guardrails, observability, and cost control (LLMOps / AI-Ops).

Product engineering (core)

1. Design Modular, reusable platforms with AI-native SDLC ownership; embed AI into core product logic, not as an add-on.
2. Have deep understanding of microservices, API-first design, Event-driven architecture (streaming, pub/sub, async and orchestration patterns)
3. Have prior experience of cloud-native delivery — containers / Kubernetes, serverless along with CI/CD toolchain, DevSecOps, and IaC patterns.

Business development & pre-sales

1. Lead the technical side of pursuits: solution shaping, estimates, proposals, and demos.
2. Build client trust that expands engagements.

Building the CoE

1. Define the hiring bar and interview standards; recruit and mentor the founding team.
2. Create architecture governance and reusable assets; align to business capabilities and transformation KPIs.

MUST-HAVE QUALIFICATIONS

1. Fluent Polish and fluent English — both mandatory.
2. Hands-on builder — prototypes, writes and reviews code, and leads by building.
3. Deep AI / agentic expertise — LLMs, RAG, and orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, Temporal or similar); enterprise AI integration.
4. Strong product-engineering background — shipping production software, not only advisory work.
5. Large-scale distributed systems — microservices, event-driven architecture, Kubernetes / containers, API-first, DevSecOps.
6. Hands-on depth in Azure or GCP — production architecture and delivery, not just certification.
7. Client-facing gravitas; proven technical leadership and mentoring of senior engineers.

DESIRED

1. Data platforms — Databricks (Lakehouse, MLflow, Unity Catalog, Mosaic AI) and/or Snowflake, Spark, dbt, Delta. Cloud and/or Databricks certifications.
2. Experience standing up a new team, practice, or CoE.
3. Regulated industries (finance, healthcare, pharma) and EU / GDPR context.

EXPERIENCE & LOCATION

1. ~15+ years in engineering and architecture with recent AI depth — a guide, not a hard filter; the blend of hands-on AI / product depth and leadership matters more than tenure.
2. Comfortable operating with ambiguity as the first senior hire in a new region.
3. Based in a primary Polish hub — Warsaw or Kraków preferred