Solution Architect

The Solution Architect acts as the technical interface between business needs, Product Squads, and Engineering within INTERPOL's Technology and Engineering Sub-Directorate. The role designs secure, scalable, and reliable IT solutions aligned with business objectives and enterprise standards, providing senior technical leadership and ensuring architectural governance.

Responsibilities

• Act as the Architecture Design Authority for the Product Squad, accountable for the end-to-end solution architecture and ensuring designs are directly translatable into software implementation.
• Design secure, scalable, resilient, and maintainable architectures aligned with Product Objectives and Definition of Done.
• Translate Epics, Features, and complex business requirements into implementable architectural designs, technical enablers, and non-functional requirements.
• Define and evolve the product technical roadmap, balancing short-term Minimum Viable Product (MVP) delivery and long-term architectural sustainability.
• Ensure systematic adoption of INTERPOL’s shared engineering platforms and services (AI & Data Platform, Identity, API & Integration, Cloud and DevSecOps tooling).
• Design solutions to comply with data access, security-by-design, privacy-by-design principles, and AI integration such as “LLMs, MCP, RAG”, etc. where relevant.
• Act as a key feedback channel to Engineering by identifying gaps, limitations, or improvement opportunities in shared platforms and services based on Product Squad experience.
• Partner with Product Managers during discovery, backlog refinement, and sprint planning to assess feasibility, architectural impact, and technical trade-offs.
• Collaborate with IT Project Manager and Scrum Masters to proactively identify and resolve architectural or technical impediments affecting delivery flow and predictability.
• Participate actively in Agile ensuring architecture evolves iteratively and remains aligned with product outcomes.
• Work closely with Engineering team and platform owners to ensure architectural patterns are practical, reusable, and aligned with delivery realities.
• Contribute to the Solution Design Competency Centre by sharing reusable patterns, reference implementations, architectural decisions, and lessons learned.
• Support continuous improvement of shared services through structured feedback, design proposals, and participation in engineering roadmap discussions.
• Apply Enterprise Architecture principles and standards, including security-by-design, cloud governance, data sovereignty, and compliance requirements.
• Participate in the Technical Architecture Committee (TAC) and the Architecture Review Board (ARB), presenting and reviewing designs at enterprise level.
• Ensure that Squad-level architectural decisions remain consistent with enterprise reference architectures, standards, and strategic directions.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership within the Product Squad, mentoring the squad on architectural principles, design patterns, and quality attributes.
• Lead architectural spikes, proofs of concept, and targeted design or code reviews (where applicable) to de-risk complex or high-impact technical choices.
• Promote a culture of engineering excellence, autonomy, accountability, balancing delivery speed, and long-term maintainability.
• Promote innovation and continuous improvement within the Product Squad and across the Technology and Engineering Directorate.
• Actively contribute to improving practices, tools, standards, and ways of working across ICT.
• Contribute to and, where appropriate, lead the definition and evolution of software architecture practices, development frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, and quality standards.
• Support Product Squads through hands-on technical involvement in complex or high-risk areas, ensuring software solutions are robust, maintainable, and aligned with architectural and business objectives.
• Assess technical feasibility, delivery risks, and cost implications of architectural alternatives, supporting informed decision-making at product and enterprise levels.
• Perform any other related duties as required by the hierarchy.

Requirements

• 3 to 4 years’ University degree or equivalent level of training in Computer Science or a related discipline.
• Certification ITIL Foundation (desirable).
• Certification in architecture frameworks (TOGAF) (desirable).
• Certification in IT governance and methods (such as COBIT) (desirable).
• Agile Certifications (e.g. Scrum, SAFe, or equivalent Agile delivery frameworks) (desirable).
• At least 5 years of total experience in IT in large and complex organizations.
• At least 2 years of experience as a Solution Architect or equivalent.
• Fluency in English.
• Proficiency of a second official working language of the Organization (Arabic, French or Spanish) would be an additional asset.
• Strong hands-on experience in enterprise full-stack application development using Java/Spring Boot and Angular within Agile delivery environments.
• Practical experience leveraging AI-assisted software development tools and practices (e.g., context specification, SDD) to accelerate software design, implementation, testing, documentation, and code review activities.
• Proven experience in working in Agile/Scrum Delivery teams.
• Strong programming background in Java and/or another object-oriented programming language.
• Solid architectural experience with at least two of the following patterns: Microservices architectures, Event-driven/event-based architectures, Message brokers, Service mesh.
• Strong knowledge of RDBMS (preferably Postgre/SQL) and NoSQL databases.
• Proven experience in REST API design including API best practices and industrialization, Authentication and authorization, Access control and security considerations.
• Hands-on experience with containerized platforms such as Kubernetes, Docker.
• Practical experience Designing and operating CI/CD pipelines.
• Very good communication skills.
• Capable of defending their point of view.
• Ability to work in multi-cultural / international environments.
• Knowledge of BPMN or other process modeling frameworks (desirable).
• Practical exposure to AI technologies (e.g. MCP or similar) (desirable).
• Practical exposure to Modern data architectures (Data Lakes, Vector Databases, etc.) (desirable).
• Understanding and application of Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SSDLC) (desirable).
• Experience with public cloud infrastructures, such as AWS, Azure or GC (desirable).
• Practical knowledge of the Criminal Police (desirable).

Skills

• ITIL Foundation
• TOGAF
• COBIT Implementation
• Agile Certifications
• Solution Architecture leadership
• Enterprise Applications
• Java Programming
• Spring Boot
• Angular
• AI-assisted Software Development
• Agile Development
• Scrum
• Microservices Architecture
• Event-driven architecture
• Message Brokers
• Service Meshes
• RDBMS
• PostgreSQL
• SQL
• NoSQL Databases
• REST API Design
• API Security
• Authentication and Authorization
• Containerization Technologies
• Kubernetes
• Docker Containers
• CI/CD Pipelines
• Secure Software Development Lifecycle
• Private Cloud Infrastructure
• AWS
• Azure
• Google Cloud Platform

Languages

English