Principal Enterprise Architect, CH
A senior consultancy role: you act as the trusted enterprise architect on Swiss client accounts, guiding technical decisions and turning AI prototypes into secure, production-grade enterprise systems. Requires deep cloud-native stack expertise (k8s, data, streaming), recent GenAI/RAG experience, and German fluency.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Switzerland, Switzerland
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Principal
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 2+ years
- Category
- Architecture
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Minimum 12 years professional experience in complex environments, gained in consultancy, agency, or system integrator
- Personally written and shipped production code; still reads code routinely and can run a credible code review
- Led integration and rollout of at least one enterprise-scale system end-to-end (ERP, CRM, core banking/insurance, or comparable) as builder/integrator
- Recent work on modern stacks: cloud-native, API-first, event-driven — not exclusively legacy migrations
- Production experience leading solutions across several major enterprise stack categories (data stores, messaging/streaming, container platforms, integration middleware)
- Fluent across modern enterprise stack solution categories (OLTP/columnar/vector data stores, messaging/streaming, k8s, identity, integration middleware) with hands-on production experience in at least
- Able to run a credible technical design review and challenge engineers on substance
- Can stand up a working prototype in days, including with AI coding agents (Claude Code or similar)
- Designs right-sized solutions at both enterprise and application level; knows when not to build, buy, or standardize
- Actively upskilled into modern AI in the last 2–4 years: GenAI, RAG, agents, evals, deployment patterns
- Can challenge AI engineers on substance and integrate AI credibly into enterprise architectures (no AI research background needed)
- Strong storyteller: makes complex technology simple for non-technical boards and defensible to technical CTOs
- Able to quickly read a client's environment and factor it into proposals
- Has been trusted external tech advisor for at least one senior client over multiple years
- Native or near-native German (Swiss German strongly preferred) and business-fluent English
Full description
The role of Principal Enterprise Architect at vector8 is key to ensuring our clients make better technology decisions—and turn those decisions into secure, scalable systems that work in the real world. The position is suited to a senior, technically deep Enterprise Architect who has built, integrated, and operated complex enterprise systems - and over the last few years has built credible AI expertise on top of that foundation.
Responsibilities
Working collaboratively with senior client stakeholders, the Principal Enterprise Architect will be the technical advisor of choice, elevating architectural quality across our client portfolio in Switzerland.
This role is for a builder, with real engineering scars, who has actual world expertise with code, deployments, production incidents and integration battles - who has a demonstrable track record of shipping non-trivial enterprise systems into production. You will:
- Carry pre-sales weight. When senior client stakeholders ask integration, deployment, and dependency questions, this person has lived the answers and earns trust without hesitation.
- Lift delivery quality. The bridge between “AI works in a notebook” and “AI is a real production system inside a regulated enterprise” is where projects slow down. The Principal Enterprise Architect will be someone who has crossed that bridge many times.
- Be the trust anchor. Working on strategic accounts the Principal Enterprise Architect will interact with senior stakeholders in the client’s technical organisation, becoming the go-to technical advisor, who earns the right to push back.
Requirements
Mandatory Experience
You will have a minimum of 12 years professional experience working in complex environments with experience gained in a consultancy, agency, or system integrator environment.
Mandatory Technical depth:
- You will have personally written and shipped production code. You will still read code routinely and can run a credible code review.
- You will have personally led the integration and rollout of at least one enterprise-scale system end-to-end - ERP, CRM, core banking / insurance platform, or comparable. You will have done this as the builder/integrator, not as the strategy advisor watching from the side.
- Your recent work will be on modern stacks (cloud-native, API-first, event-driven), not exclusively legacy migrations.
- You will have production experience leading solutions across several major categories of the enterprise stack (data stores, messaging / streaming, container platforms, integration middleware), not a single-platform career.
- You will be fluent across the major solution categories of a modern enterprise stack - data stores (OLTP, columnar, vector), messaging and streaming, container orchestration (k8s), identity, integration middleware. Essentially you will understand the first principles behind each category, knows the leading offerings in each, and will have hands-on production experience with at least one in most categories, while being conversant in all.