Senior Solutions Architect 

Position: Senior Solution Architect 

Location: Brussels

Start Date: asap

End Date: 03/07/26 (with possibility of extension)

Role Summary:

The ideal candidate will have proven expertise in strong communication skills, and the ability to translate complex operational constraints into clear, actionable architectural decisions. You will work at the intersection of operations, IT, and external partners — building consensus, resolving ambiguities, and ensuring that architecture decisions are operationally safe, maintainable, and future-proof throughout the delivery lifecycle.

Key Responsibilities:

Architecture Leadership:

• Assess the current integration landscape and define scalable, secure, and vendor-neutral reference architectures for operational systems.
• Evaluate architecture options and present clear trade-off analyses to support informed decision-making by project and business leadership.
• Ensure business logic remains independently owned and evolvable, outside of proprietary equipment software.
• Design for high availability and operational resilience, with explicit failover behavior and graceful degradation across all integration points.
• Provide architectural support for event-driven integration initiatives, enabling downstream systems to evolve independently.

IT/OT Boundary & Security:

• Define and document the IT/OT network boundary, including segmentation, access control, and secure communication patterns.
• Specify authentication and encryption mechanisms for all interfaces crossing the operational technology boundary.
• Ensure compliance with applicable industrial cybersecurity standards and internal security policies.
• Promote security-by-design principles across all integration components and delivery teams.

Collaboration & Governance:

• Work closely with Operations teams, IT teams, Business stakeholders, and equipment vendors to translate requirements into clear technical decisions.
• Facilitate the resolution of open architectural decisions, navigating the natural tension between operational stability and IT-driven standardization.
• Provide architectural guidance and review for development teams throughout the delivery lifecycle.
• Contribute to architecture governance by establishing interface standards, schema conventions, and integration best practices.
• Support project delivery phases with architectural oversight and timely resolution of integration issues.

Documentation & Best Practices:

• Produce and maintain clear, unambiguous technical specifications usable as references across business, IT, and vendor stakeholders.
• Translate business and operational requirements into concrete, implementable architectural decisions.
• Promote architectural best practices across teams and domains.
• Stay current on advancements in IT/OT integration and cloud-native connectivity patterns.

Qualifications:

Experience:

• 10+ years in solution or integration architecture.
• Demonstrated experience designing integration architectures between operational equipment and IT or cloud backend systems.
• Experience working with equipment vendors to define, review, and validate interface contracts.
• Solid understanding of OT network architecture and the security constraints specific to operational environments.
• Experience with real-time integration patterns — synchronous and asynchronous communication, latency management, timeout handling, and failover design.
• Familiarity with event-driven architecture principles and technologies such as MQTT, AMQP, or Kafka is a plus.
• Experience with REST/HTTPS API design and integration gateway patterns.

Technical Skills:

• Strong understanding of IT/OT boundary design — network segmentation, authentication schemes, and secure communication across operational and enterprise domains.
• Ability to produce precise, unambiguous technical specifications suitable as contractual references.
• Familiarity with high-availability and resilience design patterns — redundancy, failover, and graceful degradation.
• Experience with integration patterns for heterogeneous systems across synchronous and asynchronous communication models.

Soft Skills:

• Excellent communication skills — able to translate complex technical topics into clear recommendations for both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and building clarity from incomplete or evolving requirements.
• Collaborative and pragmatic — balancing architectural rigor with delivery realism.
• Experienced in multi-stakeholder environments with diverse priorities across operations, IT, business, and external partners.
• Inspirational approach to architecture — driving adoption through clarity of vision and quality of reasoning rather than authority.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience producing formal functional specification documents for  automation or integration projects.
• Exposure to DevSecOps practices and secure development in mixed IT/OT environments.
• Familiarity with event streaming architectures as a target state for operational event distribution.