Chief Architect

Big 4 Consultancy Firm · India

Title: Chief Architect – Advisory Digital

Key responsibilities

Architecture strategy and roadmap -

• Own target-state enterprise architecture for distributed, cloud-native platforms and products across multiple business units.
• Define and govern reference architectures, blueprints, and standards for multi-tenant SaaS, microservices, and event-driven systems.

Platform engineering and IDP -

• Lead design and rollout of Internal Developer Platforms to standardize golden paths, improve developer experience, and accelerate delivery.
• Define platform SLAs/SLOs, golden templates, and paved roads for services, data, observability, and security.

Cloud architecture and vendor neutrality -

• Architect solutions across Azure, AWS and GCP with a vendor-neutral mindset

Multi-tenant SaaS -

• Design and operate secure, scalable, cost-efficient multi-tenant architectures including tenant isolation, entitlements, billing/quotas, and data protection.

Security, identity, and compliance by design -

• Embed security and privacy controls into architecture (Zero Trust, IAM, secrets management, KMS/HSM, network segmentation)

DevSecOps and engineering excellence -

• Drive CI/CD, GitOps, policy-as-code, and SRE practices; improve DORA metrics and engineering productivity.

Integration, APIs, and service connectivity -

• Define API strategy (gateway management, versioning, monetization) and service connectivity (service mesh, mTLS, traffic management).

Data and AI platform architecture -

• Guide modern data architectures (lakehouse, streaming, governance) and AI/ML platforms for model training, deployment, and monitoring.

Governance and operating model -

• Lead architecture governance across a matrixed enterprise; run ARBs, standards councils, and technology guardrails.

Minimum qualifications

• Tech Graduate/ PG with 17+ years in software engineering and architecture with significant time in senior/principal/chief architect roles.
• Deep expertise in cloud-native and distributed systems: microservices, event-driven architectures, CQRS, caching, resiliency patterns.
• Proven experience designing and operating multi-tenant SaaS platforms at enterprise scale.
• Strong hands-on experience on Azure,
• Container orchestration and connectivity: Kubernetes, Helm/Kustomize, service meshes (e.g., Istio/Linkerd), and API management (e.g., Apigee, Kong, Azure/API Gateway).
• DevSecOps and automation: CI/CD, GitOps (Argo CD/Flux), IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation, Bicep), policy-as-code (OPA), and supply-chain security.
• Data and AI: familiarity with lakehouse platforms (e.g., Databricks, BigQuery, Snowflake), event streaming (Kafka/Pulsar), and AI/ML platforms (SageMaker, Vertex AI, Azure ML); understanding of MLOps and responsible AI practices.
• Experience leading architecture governance in large, complex enterprises; established ARB processes and standards.