Architect - Staff Software Engineer

About Wakacje.pl:

We are an organization that has been fulfilling the travel dreams of Poles for 25 years. Wakacje.pl is the largest e-commerce platform in Poland and a network of travel agencies offering a wide range of travel products. Since 2015, we have been part of Wirtualna Polska Holding – the largest Polish group of media and e-commerce companies. At Wakacje.pl, we offer thousands of domestic and international trips, as well as travel insurance, airport parking, and holiday vouchers. We constantly expand our offer to best meet our customers' needs. 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 us:

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).

Who we are looking for?

Solutions Architects form a guild that provides end-to-end architectural coverage across our systems and customer journey steps. Each Architect owns a defined slice — a system (e.g., search, booking, payments) or a journey step (e.g., checkout, post-booking) — and is the named technical authority for that area. Together, the guild ensures every critical part of our estate is owned, coherent, and moving toward a clear target state.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will set architectural direction, make and document decisions, and ensure those decisions are understood and adopted in practice — not just written down.

Job description

Key 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

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

What do 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 form one of the office: Alchemia office in Gdańsk
Casual dress code.

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

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