Lead Technical Architect

About the Role

As a Lead Technical Architect at Qatar Airways, you will spearhead technology modernization and digital transformation efforts for a designated Line of Business. You will craft technology roadmaps and architectural frameworks that foster innovation, streamline automation, and improve operational effectiveness. Your leadership will guarantee that technology investments align with enterprise-wide standards, delivering scalable, secure, resilient, and cost-efficient solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Establish and enforce the technical architecture and target-state blueprint for your business line, ensuring coherence with enterprise technology strategies, cloud direction, security policies, and modernization goals; maintain adherence to this blueprint across projects.
• Provide strategic leadership in Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevSecOps, Cloud Engineering, AI integration, and Enterprise Architecture, setting standards and best practices.
• Collaborate with other architects and technology leaders to promote platform standardization, reuse, and enterprise-wide engineering efficiencies.
• Design cloud-native, scalable, resilient, and secure architectures on Azure, GCP, hybrid cloud, and on-premises platforms, optimizing performance, availability, and cost.
• Develop governance and operational standards for SRE, including service level objectives/indicators, error budgets, resilience testing, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and readiness.
• Drive DevSecOps implementation embedding security, compliance, quality, and operational controls throughout the software delivery lifecycle.
• Define enterprise CI/CD, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), GitOps, test automation, release automation, and deployment pipeline standards to enhance delivery speed, quality, and stability.
• Lead evaluation and governance of software engineering and DevOps platforms (e.g., GitHub, Azure DevOps, SonarQube) including AI-powered tools.
• Implement engineering quality gates covering code quality, technical debt, dependency and supply chain security, architectural compliance, and release preparedness.
• Define and enforce AI governance frameworks promoting responsible AI adoption, compliance, risk management, and secure use of generative AI technologies.
• Drive innovations via technical evaluations and proof-of-concepts involving emerging technologies, AI, automation, cloud services, and observability tools.
• Architect and govern monitoring and observability solutions using Dynatrace, Prometheus, Grafana, Azure Monitor, OpenTelemetry, and centralized logging for comprehensive visibility.
• Develop and maintain enterprise Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) frameworks addressing availability, reliability, performance, security, observability, maintainability, and sustainability.
• Manage architecture reviews and technical assurance to ensure designs and implementations comply with enterprise standards.
• Ensure thorough performance engineering, resilience validation, security testing, observability, and production readiness prior to application deployment.
• Partner with Cyber Security and Governance teams to enhance security policies, threat mitigation, supply chain security, and regulatory adherence.
• Lead technical governance of production including incident/problem management, root cause analysis, and post-incident actions.
• Establish monitoring, capacity planning, operational analytics for early detection and mitigation of service degradations and vulnerabilities.
• Collaborate with vendors and cloud providers to architect and govern enterprise integrations, APIs, event-driven architectures, and platform services.
• Conduct portfolio assessments and devise modernization roadmaps including cloud migration, consolidation, re-platforming, technical debt reduction.
• Promote technology innovation and continuous improvement leveraging automation, AI, cloud capabilities, developer productivity platforms, and modern engineering methodologies.
• Mentor and develop a high-caliber architecture and engineering community, empowering self-directed enterprise transformation leadership.
• Advocate engineering excellence through standards, communities of practice, governance, reusable platforms, and best practices.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or honors in Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, Sciences, or equivalent qualifications.
• More than 10 years of experience in architecture or system design roles, including over 3 years focusing on technology architecture, cloud, and DevSecOps.
• Comprehensive knowledge of distributed systems, microservices, and cloud computing.
• Proven expertise in performance optimization, scalability, and reliability engineering.
• Demonstrated ability to research and adopt emerging technologies and development tools.
• Strong aptitude for fostering collaborative teams, encouraging innovation and ongoing improvement.
• Competence in integrating AI/ML and generative AI into software solutions.
• Proficiency with advanced software engineering platforms, containerization, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Solid understanding of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and software quality assurance procedures.
• Expertise in architectural principles, enterprise integration patterns, and software design and development.
• Hands-on experience identifying application bottlenecks using tools like Dynatrace, ELK APM, or AppDynamics and communicating resolutions to teams.
• Excellent communication, interpersonal, and organizational skills.
• Relevant certifications such as TOGAF and cloud architecture (Azure or Google).
• Exposure to enterprise sectors, specifically aviation, is desirable.

Additional Information

Qatar Airways is a fast-growing multinational with diverse business ventures. It fosters a culture where ambition meets limitless opportunity, encouraging innovative solutions and professional growth within an international setting.