Software Architect Team Lead

* **Job Title:** Product Group Team Lead / Architect * **Location:** Amsterdam, Netherlands (Hybrid) * **Employment Type:** Permanent, Full-Time * **About Us:** Our client is a global digital distributor of electronic components, empowering modern businesses with data-driven digital tools, services, and supply chain solutions. They are establishing a new organization to strengthen our internal software delivery, improve production ownership, and build core engineering capabilities in-house. * **Job Summary:** We are seeking a hands-on Product Group Team Lead / Architect to own the technical direction, architectural integrity, and code quality for an assigned product group or internal platform. In this senior individual contributor (IC) role, you will report directly to engineering leadership and the CTO, serving as the technical authority who bridges architecture and daily implementation—driving robust system design, modernizing critical platforms, and mentoring engineers without the overhead of people management. * **Responsibilities:** * Own the overall technical direction, architectural design, and engineering quality for your assigned product group or platform. * Lead architecture reviews, technical design discussions, work breakdown, dependency mapping, and implementation sequencing. * Remain actively hands-on in the codebase, writing high-quality code, troubleshooting complex production issues, and reviewing critical changes. * Partner closely with Product Managers, Delivery Managers, and Engineering Managers to translate roadmap requirements into sound, scalable technical plans and risk assessments. * Act as the L3 technical escalation lead for business-critical incidents, conducting thorough root cause analyses (RCA) and implementing durable remediations. * Proactively identify technical debt, architectural bottlenecks, and single points of failure, executing pragmatic stabilization and modernization strategies without disrupting live business operations. * Mentor and coach engineers through constructive code reviews, architectural pairing, and technical documentation rather than purely theoretical guidelines. * Define and uphold standards for maintainability, testability, application security, and release readiness in collaboration with QA, DevOps, DBA, and Security teams. * Document architectural patterns and technical decisions to ensure reliable knowledge transfer and onboarding across distributed teams. * **Required Qualifications (Must-Haves):** * 8+ years of professional hands-on software engineering experience. * 3+ years in a technical leadership, software architecture, principal engineer, or senior lead IC capacity. * Active, hands-on coding capability with a regular rhythm of writing code, debugging, and resolving production defects. * Deep expertise in software architecture, API design, system boundaries, data modeling, enterprise integration patterns, scalability, and secure design. * Proven experience building, maintaining, and supporting business-critical, high-availability production systems. * Demonstrated track record of leading L3 technical escalations and post-incident root cause analyses. * Concrete experience stabilizing, refactoring, or modernizing legacy software platforms while sustaining continuous business operations. * Strong ability to mentor and elevate team engineering standards through practical coaching and peer reviews without requiring formal line-management authority. * Excellent communication skills in English, with experience collaborating across distributed, multi-timezone teams. * Valid right to work in the Netherlands without requiring visa sponsorship. * **Preferred Qualifications (Nice-to-Haves):** * Strong depth in one or more core technical stacks: * **SourceCore Platform:** C#, .NET / .NET Core, SQL Server (T-SQL design and query tuning), ERP systems (such as NetSuite), and enterprise B2B transaction flows. * **Legacy Platforms:** PHP (Symfony, Laravel), TypeScript/JavaScript, and modernization/refactoring workflows. * **Mobile & Vision:** Mobile architecture (Android/Kotlin, iOS, or cross-platform), camera/scanner integrations, or warehouse operations tooling. * **NLP / AI:** Production ML/NLP workflows, model evaluation, and text-processing pipelines. * Experience with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP) and containerization/orchestration. * Knowledge of event-driven architectures, message brokers (e.g., RabbitMQ, Kafka), and asynchronous data pipelines. * Familiarity with CI/CD automation, Azure DevOps, Jira, and modern testing frameworks. * Domain background in electronic components distribution, supply chain logistics, manufacturing, or B2B e-commerce platforms. * **Success Metrics for the Role:** * **High Ownership Mindset:** You take total accountability for the stability, performance, and long-term health of the systems you oversee. * **Sound Judgment Under Pressure:** You make clear, pragmatic technical trade-offs during complex production incidents and architectural debates. * **Coaching Approach:** You lead by example through clear code, constructive feedback, and shared problem-solving rather than decree. * **Pragmatic Delivery:** You know how to balance long-term architectural ideals with immediate business delivery goals.