About the Company
NISH is recruiting an experienced Enterprise Architect for a consulting assignment with one of our clients, a key player in the Belgian and European energy landscape. At NISH, we believe an inclusive and diverse work environment leads to more innovation, creativity and better results.
About the Role
Excited to play a leading architecture role in the energy transition? Working alongside other consultants and the client’s in-house teams, you will help shape a sustainable, reliable and future-ready IT landscape that supports a green energy infrastructure.
You will operate at the heart of an enterprise-wide IT transformation, defining governance, guiding architecture practice, and ensuring strategic alignment across business and IT stakeholders.
Responsibilities
* Lead the definition and continuous improvement of the architecture governance framework — principles, standards, policies, reference architectures and golden scenarios — within a clear Architecture Review Board (ARB) decision workflow, including decision packs, traceability and an escalation path.
* Contribute to the implementation of a federated target operating model and ensure alignment with the enterprise digital platform by translating platform guardrails into consumable guidance for local delivery teams.
* Support the Head of IT Architecture in strategic studies, evaluations and decision-making discussions.
* Coach and provide guidance to other architecture roles across the organization.
* Communicate the application strategy and related processes to business and IT stakeholders.
* Collect and analyze business gaps — using business and IT surveys — to assess and evaluate the IT landscape, in close collaboration with business architecture.
* Conduct cross-domain trade-off analyses using industry-recognized methods (e.g., ATAM) and cost-benefit analyses (e.g., CBAM) to deliver well-founded architectural recommendations, and give direction to maintain and evolve the application portfolio with application owners and key stakeholders.
* Gather application-related information (e.g., cost data) as input for analysis, leveraging standard methods such as CBAM.
* Maintain the enterprise architecture repository — including the Architecture Decision Record (ADR) repository with clear compliance levels (mandatory versus recommendation) — as a single source of truth for all architecture artifacts, models and decisions, to prevent decision drift.
* Validate architectural recommendations with senior business and IT management.
* Manage the Architecture Vision Document and contribute to an enterprise-wide IT road-map covering current and future initiatives, projects and programs, including impacts and dependencies.
* Ensure alignment and integration of architecture processes with other IT management processes such as Project Portfolio Management and IT Service Management.
* Perform Initiative Architecture Alignment Assessments as a governance gate at initiative kick-off and key delivery milestones, producing go / no-go / conditional recommendations to ensure projects and products align to the enterprise architecture vision, principles and standards.
* Conduct periodic Architecture Compliance Reviews during delivery to verify continued adherence to standards, escalating deviations to the ARB for exception or waiver processing.
* Help define, govern and maintain enterprise data architecture standards — including data modelling conventions, data integration patterns and data governance principles — and assess initiative-level data designs against these standards.
* Propose a realistic road-map of the architectural points that need to increase in maturity, with the priority and maturity level required for a large enterprise.
Qualifications
* At least 10 years of experience in an Enterprise Architecture role.
* Proven experience facilitating ARB sessions and producing decision packs with traceability.
* Strong autonomy and initiative, with the ability to engage effectively with stakeholders at all organizational levels.
* A demonstrated results-oriented mindset.
* Solid understanding of IT processes and methodologies, with practical experience using industry standards such as ITIL, TOGAF, ArchiMate, Domain-Driven Design and others.
* Experience with cloud-native architecture patterns and platform governance (guardrails, onboarding criteria, reference architecture adoption).
* A collaborative, pragmatic mindset and the ability to co-construct — acting as the link between business, IT, architecture and infrastructure teams.
* Ability to advocate and promote the adoption of reference architectures across teams.
* Familiarity with microservices and event-driven architecture approaches.
* Knowledge of Gartner architecture frameworks (e.g., TIME for Application Portfolio Management).
* Experience working with modeling tools such as Sparx Enterprise Architect, SAP LeanIX or equivalent.
* Team-oriented mindset, strong collaboration skills and excellent presentation abilities.
Preferred Skills
* Experience in merger or acquisition contexts and the associated transformation journeys.
* Hands-on experience designing and delivering IT solutions in an agile environment.
* Knowledge and experience of the Energy and Utilities sector.
Pay range and compensation package
Location: Brussels, Belgium
Onsite presence: On-site presence required on average 2 days per week (hybrid)
Work regime: Full-time
Travel: Occasional travel within the EU may be required; all travel costs are covered by the client
Work authorization (non-EU candidates): A valid work permit allowing you to work in Belgium. A valid residence permit confirming the right of residence in Belgium.
Equal Opportunity Statement
A high-impact project at a reference organization within the energy sector, at the forefront of the energy transition and ground-breaking technologies. A genuine opportunity to demonstrate your skills and develop your competencies on a one-of-a-kind transformation. A strong focus on well-being at work and a positive, supportive culture. A diverse, passionate team that values knowledge-sharing and a more sustainable future.