Principal Architect

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