IT Architect - Application Platforms

Location: Geneva · Contract: Permanent · Assignment: long term · Rate: 80 to 100% · Start: January 2027

For one of our clients based in Geneva, we are looking for an experienced IT Architect - Application Platforms.

Context

Within the IT department, an architecture team plays a central and cross-functional role. It defines and supports architectures related to:

• Custom development (Java, PHP, Python)

• Platforms and business centres of expertise (ERP, CRM, HRIS, ServiceNow, etc.)

• Data platforms and their enhancement (BI, AI, databases, data hub)

In collaboration with other architects and supporting technical teams, the team is involved in the design, creation and evolution of solutions, notably within projects and programmes. It ensures the coherence of architectures, the application of best practices and the alignment of solutions with the company’s architectural strategies and principles.

In this context, the team wishes to strengthen itself with an IT architect working transversally across various domains, programmes and projects.

Your missions

• Design and evolve the architectures of your area of expertise by providing the service levels expected by the business, ensuring quality, security and performance

• Produce architecture documents at project design stages, including various architectural views and the solution’s non-functional requirements

• Participate in initial project cost estimations

• Analyse business and technical needs of projects, programmes and teams to translate them into architectural requirements and directions

• Support projects and programmes in their architectural choices and technological evolutions, promoting reuse of existing solutions and contributing to modernisation and migration projects

• Provide expertise on managed services and respond to requests from support services and centres of expertise

• Contribute to operational support for development and operations teams: analysis of complex incidents, investigation, solution costing, reduction of failures and downtime

• Participate in operational architecture committees, arbitrate and justify exceptions

• Participate in steering committees and advise projects as an architect

• Lead and participate in peer architecture reviews

• Conduct architectural studies as part of monitoring and innovation, including proof of concept (POC) realisation

• Contribute to the preparation and evaluation of tenders

• Ensure coherence and alignment of architectures with the IT strategy driven by enterprise architecture, business needs, internal standards and existing systems, favouring modularity, scalability, maintainability and component independence

• Define modular and reusable architecture models (components, services, APIs) to strengthen maintainability and technological independence of the organisation

• Implement a strategy for anticipation and IT urbanisation and facilitate obsolescence management

• Promote reuse of architectural building blocks

• Define, maintain and enforce principles, standards and architecture patterns of technical and application foundations, ensuring their documentation and dissemination

• Feed and manage the quality of architecture repositories and architectural requirements

• Harmonise and improve methods and practices, and encourage exchanges within the architecture community

• Represent the team in various working groups

• Evaluate new technologies, identify opportunities for reuse, simplification and industrialisation, and develop architectural roadmaps and associated action plans

• Occasionally work outside usual hours on very specific topics or in support of operational teams

Education

• University Master’s degree in computer science or engineering diploma from EPF/HES or equivalent

• Ideally complemented by continuing education at CAS level relevant to the role

Essential skills

• Minimum 2 years’ experience in a similar role

• Expertise in designing technical architectures within this scope

• Expertise in architecture modelling

• Ability to support teams

• Ability to evaluate solutions and their costing, identify risks and develop mitigation plans

• Expertise in interoperability protocols (especially SOAP, REST, JMS) and authorisation and authentication protocols (OAuth2/OIDC, SAMLv2, Kerberos)

• Expertise in high availability and service continuity, with the ability to design architectures oriented towards resilience, observability and distributed monitoring

• Mastery of Web standards and awareness of Web environment challenges (security, performance, high availability, scalability)

Depending on your background, you master at least one of the following domains:

• Custom development: development and maintenance of solutions in Java, Python and/or PHP and their ecosystem; N-tier, modular, hexagonal, Clean Architecture and DDD architectures; microservices and containerisation, notably on OpenShift; service-oriented architectures, APIs and interoperability; performance, integration and evolution of custom applications; DevOps tools and CI/CD practices; automation and orchestration (IaC, Ansible, Git, API); demonstrated sensitivity to user experience and software quality

• Data and data valorisation: SQL/NoSQL databases, ETL and data pipelines; BI, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence; data and processing modelling, optimisation and performance; Data Lake / Data Warehouse architectures; data integration with applications; data security and governance

• Platforms and business centres of expertise: architecture and integration of ERP, CRM, ServiceNow, HR Access, Oracle E-Business Suite solutions, etc.; understanding of associated business processes; system integration and interoperability; customisation, extension and evolution of platforms; consideration of business strategies and needs in architectural choices

Appreciated skills

• Good knowledge of cloud architectures (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, CaaS, XaaS) and on-premise

• Good knowledge of middleware (application servers, BPM, rule engines, message brokers)

• Good knowledge of the TOGAF framework for implementing structured and standardised architectures

• Knowledge of enterprise architecture processes and best practices

• Knowledge of backup, recovery and continuity procedures

• Knowledge of ITIL

• Experience implementing good application security practices

• Practice of event-driven architectures

• Experience in technical management of internal and external teams

• Proven expertise in identifying, understanding and expressing business needs

• Understanding of user experience issues (ergonomics, mobile use)

• Ability to analyse a complex situation and formalise a summary of findings and actions to be taken

A plus

• Successful experience in a large organisation of comparable complexity

Personal qualities

• Leadership and listening skills

• Sense of responsibility and contact with stakeholders, business and users

• Close collaboration with operational and operations teams

• Positive and open attitude towards internal clients (listening, empathy, self-confidence)

• Ability to work in a team in an Agile environment and adapt effectively to unforeseen events

• Initiative, proactivity and conviction

• Flexibility, adaptability, willingness to question oneself and learn

• Excellent writing skills, rigour in documentation and ability to simplify technical messages

• High autonomy, rigour, pragmatism and ability to work with broad instructions

• Stress resistance

• Impeccable ethics, sense of service, professionalism and collaborative spirit

• Enjoyment of knowledge sharing

• Ability to manage conflict situations

• Change management skills (project management and/or coordination of technical operations)

• Ability to work in a matrix structure