Enterprise Architect

Location: Liège (Hybrid)
Contract: Permanent
Language: English
Team: Architecture
Reporting to: Head of Enterprise Architecture

Koda Staff is working exclusively with GAMING1 to hire an Enterprise Architect to help shape the evolution of its enterprise-wide technology landscape.

This is a senior, business-facing architecture role operating across multiple domains and capabilities. Rather than owning architecture for a single product area, you will translate enterprise strategy into capability evolution, target architecture, and executable transformation roadmaps.

You’ll combine strategic influence with substantial technical depth, working across Product, Engineering, Architecture, and senior business leadership to turn complex strategic questions into clear architectural decisions.

The Opportunity

As Enterprise Architect, you will help define how GAMING1’s technology landscape needs to evolve to support its long-term business and product ambitions.

You will assess the current landscape, define target states, identify capability and technology gaps, and build incremental roadmaps to move from AS-IS to TO-BE.

A major part of the role is ensuring GAMING1’s distributed architecture remains genuinely evolvable at scale — establishing principles and guardrails that allow individual teams and domains to operate autonomously without creating unnecessary coupling or fragmentation.

Your Mission

• Translate enterprise strategy into clear architectural direction
• Own target architecture across an assigned transversal scope
• Shape capability evolution across multiple business and technology domains
• Build executable transformation roadmaps connecting current and future states
• Enable autonomous teams through clear architectural principles and guardrails
• Reduce complexity, fragmentation, and unnecessary coupling across the technology landscape

Key Responsibilities

Enterprise Architecture & Capability Strategy

• Own and evolve GAMING1’s Enterprise Capability Map
• Assess current capabilities, architecture, dependencies, and maturity
• Define target architecture aligned with business strategy and product ambitions
• Identify capability and technology gaps across the enterprise
• Establish architectural principles, guardrails, and decision criteria

Distributed Systems & Technology Strategy

• Shape the evolution of GAMING1’s distributed architecture
• Guide decisions around domain and service boundaries
• Evaluate synchronous vs asynchronous communication models
• Navigate event-driven architecture, orchestration, choreography, and consistency trade-offs
• Identify and reduce semantic, temporal, deployment, data, and operational coupling
• Ensure architecture enables independent evolution rather than creating a distributed monolith

The original role places significant emphasis on distributed-system design and the ability to understand the consequences of architectural decisions beyond an individual service or domain.

Transformation & Execution

• Build incremental transformation roadmaps connecting current and target architecture
• Make sequencing, dependencies, risks, and trade-offs explicit
• Shape major initiatives early alongside Product and Engineering leadership
• Contribute to Design Authority discussions and cross-domain architectural decisions
• Use workshops, proofs of concept, and reference patterns to unblock complex initiatives

Business & Cross-Functional Leadership

• Act as a senior architecture partner to Product Managers, Heads of Product, Heads of Engineering, VPs, and senior business leaders
• Translate business and product ambition into capability and technology choices
• Challenge assumptions constructively and make long-term architectural consequences visible early
• Drive cross-domain decisions to closure when alignment is required
• Engage technology partners and vendors where external insight can improve architectural direction

This is an influence-led role with no direct reports. Success depends on technical credibility, clarity, decision quality, and the ability to lead across organisational boundaries without relying on hierarchy.

Experience & Skills

Architecture Background

• Proven experience as an Enterprise Architect or Solution Architect within a complex, multi-domain organisation
• Experience shaping architecture beyond a single product or technology domain
• Strong capability modelling, target architecture, and transformation roadmapping experience
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and integration architecture
• Experience contributing to architecture governance or Design Authority environments

Technical Depth

You should be comfortable reasoning about:

• Domain and service boundaries
• Event-driven architecture
• Synchronous and asynchronous integration
• Commands vs events
• Orchestration vs choreography
• Consistency and transaction boundaries
• Idempotency and ordering
• Resilience and failure propagation
• Data ownership and contract evolution
• Distributed-system coupling and distributed-monolith risks

You don't need to be the deepest implementation specialist in every technology. You do need enough technical depth to challenge designs, understand trade-offs, and make credible enterprise-level decisions.

Leadership & Business Impact

• Strong business acumen and technical judgement
• Able to turn ambiguity into clear, decision-ready options
• Comfortable influencing senior stakeholders without formal authority
• Strong communication and stakeholder-management skills
• Able to balance business outcomes, technical constraints, risk, and long-term architecture

Highly Valued Experience

Experience in any of the following will strengthen your profile:

• Regulated, multi-market digital product environments
• M&A integration
• Platform migrations
• Landscape rationalisation
• Multi-brand technology transformation
• Architecture repositories and capability tooling
• AI-enabled or automated architecture practices

What Success Looks Like

• Clear progress against enterprise transformation roadmaps
• Improved capability maturity across the organisation
• A more coherent and independently evolvable technology landscape
• Faster time-to-market without sacrificing long-term architectural health
• Reduced fragmentation, unnecessary coupling, and architectural dead ends
• Stronger alignment between business strategy, Product, Engineering, and Architecture

The role is ultimately measured by enterprise impact rather than architecture artefacts — particularly transformation progress, capability maturity, operational efficiency, migration capability, and time-to-market.

Growth & Career Path

Enterprise Architect is defined by scope and accountability rather than title alone. The position typically operates at Level 5+, with progression based on Knowledge, Leadership, Business Impact, and Adaptability.

Growth comes through taking ownership of broader and more complex transversal scopes, operating with greater autonomy, and delivering demonstrable enterprise-wide impact.

Interested in learning more?

Koda Staff is managing this search exclusively on behalf of GAMING1.

If the role aligns with your experience, or you'd like to explore fit and scope in more detail, applications and confidential conversations are welcome.