Architect - Staff Software Engineer

Invia x Travelplanet.pl x Wakacje.pl is one of the largest travel groups in Europe. Every year we help more than 6 million people plan their trips. Behind that sit teams in IT, Product, Data, Marketing, HR, Finance, Sales and Customer Experience, who build the tools and services those travelers use. Whichever team you join, your work shows up in how people plan and experience their holidays.

Your next stop

Solutions Architects form a guild that provides end-to-end architectural coverage across our systems and customer journey steps. Each Architect owns a defined slice - a system (e.g., search, booking, payments) or a journey step (e.g., checkout, post-booking) - and is the named technical authority for that area. Together, the guild ensures every critical part of our estate is owned, coherent, and moving toward a clear target state.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will set architectural direction, make and document decisions, and ensure those decisions are understood and adopted in practice - not just written down.

What lies ahead on your journey

• Own the end-to-end architecture of an assigned system or customer journey step - maintain a current-state assessment, a target architecture, and a sequenced, costed roadmap between them.
• Produce and keep current all architectural documentation for the slice: C4 models (L1/L2), Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), ERDs, and sequence diagrams. Every material decision has a written rationale; undocumented architecture does not count.
• Sit on the Architecture Board as the named decision authority for the slice - assess incoming proposals, drive decisions proactively, surface cross-slice conflicts, and escalate choices with material cost or strategic impact.
• Lead vendor and technology evaluations; validate team proposals against the target architecture; recommend or block technology choices within the slice with documented rationale. Escalate major changes (new language, cloud provider, database engine, or TCO > €50k over 3 years) to the CTO.
• Treat AI as a default design ingredient - evaluate where AI patterns (copilots, agentic workflows, RAG, model-backed features) create leverage, drive their adoption, and maintain a clear inventory of AI components and their risk profiles. Ensure AI usage converges on sanctioned patterns and guardrails.
• Engage directly with product, commercial, and operations stakeholders to discover business intent before design begins. Translate business problems into technical requirements and trade-off frames - design for outcomes, not for tickets.
• Own and enforce engineering standards within the slice (API design, observability, security baselines, data handling, AI usage); serve as named DRI for at least one standard across the guild. Contribute reusable patterns and golden paths back to the wider engineering organisation.
• Define SLIs and SLOs for the slice, review breach trends, and partner with Engineering Managers on quarterly reliability improvement goals.
• Coordinate with adjacent Architects to eliminate seams, duplication, and integration debt across slices. Pair on cross-slice initiatives by default.
• Actively teach architectural patterns, engineering standards, and AI guidelines across the organisation - and measure adoption, not just publication.
• Provide technology and design input to Engineering Managers and teams on architecture decisions, integration patterns, and major refactors. Does not own delivery timelines, headcount, sprint planning, or on-call rotations - those remain with Engineering Management.

What to pack in your suitcase

• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in an architecture or principal engineering role spanning multiple teams or systems.
• Hands-on experience evolving legacy software at scale, from refactoring and performance optimization to leading phased re-architecture toward modern, maintainable platforms.
• Proven track record of owning end-to-end architecture for cross-cutting or platform domains - infrastructure, observability, developer platforms, shared services, or similar.
• Deep experience designing and evolving distributed systems at scale: service boundaries, integration patterns, event-driven architectures, and API design.
• Ability to produce and maintain living architectural documentation - C4 models, ADRs, ERDs, sequence diagrams - and hold others to the same standard.
• Experience defining and enforcing engineering standards across multiple teams, with measurable adoption outcomes rather than just published guidelines.
• Demonstrable ability to engage non-technical stakeholders - product, commercial, operations - and translate business intent into concrete technical requirements and trade-offs.
• Strong communication and influencing skills: able to drive architectural decisions through persuasion and documented rationale, without direct line authority over engineers.
• Comfort operating in a governed, multi-team environment - experienced with Architecture Boards, decision escalation paths, and structured ADR practices.
• Familiarity with modern frontend architecture patterns, including React, SSR, Next.js, and Backend for Frontend (BFF), sufficient to assess design decisions and engage credibly with frontend teams.

Your extra baggage of experience

• Experience working within or adapting scaled agile frameworks (SAFe, LeSS, or similar) in a principal engineering or architect capacity.
• Hands-on experience designing or productionising AI/ML systems - LLM integrations, RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, or model evaluation frameworks.
• Familiarity with travel, e-commerce, or marketplace platform architectures - particularly search, booking, or payments domains.
• Experience building or operating internal developer platforms, golden paths, or shared engineering toolchains adopted across a large engineering organisation.
• Background contributing to or maintaining a technology radar, vendor evaluation frameworks, or organisation-wide engineering standards programmes.
• Experience defining and operationalising SLOs at the platform level, including instrumentation, alerting, and reliability review cadences.

What you will find on board

• A remote working model, with a commitment to work from the office at least once a quarter
• Opportunities for professional development aligned with current business needs and your individual career goals,
• A benefits cafeteria platform - we do not decide what siuts for you, you can choose from life insurance, a sports card, and lunch and shopping vouchers,
• Cooperation in international environment,
• Access to Audioteka and Pilot WP, helping you balance personal development with moments of relaxation,
• An openness to innovation and AI-powered tools that support our daily work and help us achieve even better results,
• Discounts on our products for you, your family, and friends,
• Comfortable offices in convenient locations (Gdańsk - Alchemia, Warsaw - Business Garden, Wrocław - Legnicka Business Garden), along with a friendly and informal atmosphere that encourages collaboration,
• Option to join International educational trips, so you can see the destinations and hotels from our portfolio for yourself,
• A culture built on trust, open communication, feedback, and appreciation (because the best journeys begin with a great team),
• Team where #Explore #Engage #Enjoy build our travel mindset.

Get to know us better and see what our everyday journey looks like: Instagram, LinkedIn, Tiktok, Facebook.