Principal Architect – Distributed Platforms & Systems
Location: Liège (Hybrid & Flexible)
Language: English
Contract: Freelance or Permanent
Duration: Long-term collaboration
We are supporting a large organisation operating in a complex, distributed environment, currently evolving a modern digital platform spanning multiple domains, technologies, and teams.
This is a highly transversal Principal Architect role, operating end-to-end across systems, platforms, integrations, and data-heavy environments. The role combines strong architectural vision and systems thinking with deep hands-on engineering involvement, ensuring architecture decisions align with business strategy, time-to-market, and long-term platform evolution.
The Role
As Principal Architect, you will own architecture end-to-end, operating across platforms, integrations, and data-heavy systems rather than within a single domain.
You will:
Define and evolve end-to-end architecture aligned with business strategy, delivery speed, and long-term scalability
Design and validate distributed, event-driven systems and integration patterns
Work closely with Data and Platform teams to improve system design, delivery efficiency, automation, and quality
Stay close to engineering teams, stepping in when needed to review designs, validate workflows, and unblock delivery
Continuously assess the engineering funnel to ensure strong technical execution and scalability
Maintain a clear architectural inventory (APIs, platforms, integrations, capabilities) using tools such as Ardoq
Technical Scope
.NET, Python, Node.js, React; strong hands-on engineering
Distributed, event-driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Service Bus)
CI/CD, automated testing, DevEx, scalability and resilience
What We’re Looking For
Principal / Lead Architect experience in complex environments
Hands-on, execution-focused, pragmatic
Strong stakeholder skills
Comfortable with ambiguity and continuous improvement