Senior Application Architect

Young Future Architects; Abu Dhabi; Remote; AED 420,000 - 700,000; Full time

Job summary

Young Future Architects is seeking a Senior Application Architect to lead architecture across enterprise applications and digital platforms, shaping technology strategy and governance for scalable, secure, and high-performance solutions.

You will partner with Product, Data, Cloud, Security and Engineering teams to design patterns, define standards, and drive modernization, integration, and lifecycle governance.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading architecture for complex enterprise applications and digital platforms.
• Strong knowledge of software architecture principles, patterns, and best practices.
• Experience with cloud-native and hybrid architectures and integration patterns.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain application architecture strategies aligned with business and technology goals.
• Lead architecture and design of complex enterprise applications and platforms.
• Define architecture principles, patterns, standards, and design guidelines.
• Collaborate with Engineering, Security, Product, and Data teams to ensure scalable, secure solutions.

Skills

Application architecture

Software architecture

Solution design

Enterprise applications

Cloud architecture

Systems integration

Large-scale software engineering

Job description

We're Hiring: Senior Application Architect

Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

Employment Type: Full-Time

Experience Level: Senior

Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a globally focused organization committed to building secure, scalable, reliable, and high-performing digital platforms and business applications across diverse markets.

Our technology teams collaborate across Architecture, Software Engineering, Product, Data, Cloud, Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Operations, and business functions to design and deliver technology solutions that support business growth, operational efficiency, and exceptional customer experiences.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Application Architect to lead application architecture, solution design, technology strategy, modernization, integration, and technical governance across enterprise applications and digital platforms.

The ideal candidate will provide architectural leadership throughout the application lifecycle, translating business requirements into scalable technical solutions while ensuring security, performance, maintainability, interoperability, and alignment with enterprise technology standards.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain application architecture strategies aligned with business and technology objectives.
• Lead the architecture and design of complex enterprise applications, platforms, and digital solutions.
• Translate business requirements, functional needs, and technical constraints into scalable application architectures.
• Define application architecture principles, patterns, standards, reference architectures, and design guidelines.
• Evaluate existing applications and identify opportunities for modernization, optimization, consolidation, and simplification.
• Develop application modernization strategies for legacy systems and technology platforms.
• Design scalable, resilient, maintainable, and high-performance application solutions.
• Define application components, services, modules, interfaces, dependencies, and technology boundaries.
• Develop architecture diagrams, solution blueprints, technical specifications, and design documentation.
• Establish appropriate architectural patterns including layered architecture, microservices, event-driven architecture, service-oriented architecture, and modular application design where applicable.
• Design application integration solutions across APIs, messaging platforms, databases, enterprise systems, and external services.
• Define API strategies, integration standards, interface contracts, and service communication patterns.
• Collaborate with Enterprise Architecture teams to ensure application designs align with broader technology architecture.
• Work closely with Software Engineering teams to ensure architecture decisions are practical, implementable, and maintainable.
• Partner with Product Managers, Business Analysts, and business stakeholders to understand functional and non-functional requirements.
• Lead technical discovery, architecture workshops, design sessions, and solution assessments.
• Evaluate technology options, frameworks, platforms, libraries, and architectural approaches.
• Conduct technology assessments and make recommendations based on scalability, security, performance, maintainability, cost, and strategic alignment.
• Establish application technology roadmaps and lifecycle plans.
• Define application standards for coding architecture, configuration, deployment, observability, resilience, and maintainability.
• Ensure applications meet defined availability, performance, scalability, reliability, and recovery requirements.
• Design application resilience, fault-tolerance, disaster-recovery, and business-continuity capabilities.
• Identify application dependencies, single points of failure, technical risks, and architectural constraints.
• Develop strategies to reduce technical debt and improve application maintainability.
• Establish application lifecycle-management practices covering development, testing, deployment, operation, enhancement, and retirement.
• Collaborate with Cloud and Infrastructure teams on cloud-native and hybrid application architectures.
• Design applications for appropriate cloud platforms, containers, serverless services, managed services, and infrastructure capabilities.
• Ensure application architectures support scalability, elasticity, observability, and operational resilience.
• Work with Cybersecurity teams to incorporate security-by-design principles into application architecture.
• Define authentication, authorization, identity, encryption, secrets management, application security, and data-protection requirements.
• Ensure applications comply with organizational security policies, regulatory requirements, privacy obligations, and architectural standards.
• Collaborate with Data and Analytics teams on application data models, data flows, data access, and integration requirements.
• Define appropriate database, caching, storage, transaction, and data-access architectures.
• Assess application performance and identify architectural improvements to address bottlenecks.
• Establish performance, scalability, load, reliability, and capacity requirements for critical applications.
• Support application performance testing and architecture validation.
• Review application designs, technical specifications, source-code architecture, and implementation approaches.
• Conduct architecture reviews and provide technical guidance to engineering teams.
• Establish architecture governance processes, design-review checkpoints, and technical decision frameworks.
• Maintain architecture decision records and document significant technical decisions, assumptions, trade-offs, and risks.
• Identify opportunities to standardize reusable application components, services, frameworks, and design patterns.
• Promote engineering practices that improve application quality, testability, maintainability, and delivery efficiency.
• Support DevOps and CI/CD practices by ensuring application architecture is compatible with automated build, testing, deployment, and monitoring processes.
• Collaborate with Site Reliability Engineering and Operations teams to improve application observability and operational performance.
• Support incident investigations involving architectural, integration, scalability, or application-design issues.
• Conduct root-cause analysis for recurring application failures and recommend sustainable architectural improvements.
• Support major application implementations, migrations, upgrades, integrations, and technology transformations.
• Manage architectural dependencies across multiple applications, platforms, teams, and technology programs.
• Evaluate third-party applications, SaaS platforms, software products, and technology vendors from an architectural perspective.
• Review vendor proposals, technical designs, integration specifications, and solution architectures.
• Assess build-versus-buy options and provide architectural recommendations.
• Support procurement and vendor-selection activities by defining technical requirements and evaluation criteria.
• Develop application migration and transition strategies for new or replacement platforms.
• Ensure application architectures support future business growth, new markets, changing customer needs, and evolving technology requirements.

Key Performance Indicators

• Application architecture compliance
• Architecture review completion
• Architecture decision turnaround time
• Application availability
• Application reliability
• Application performance
• Application scalability
• Application response time
• System resilience
• Critical application incident rate
• Application failure rate
• Mean time to recovery
• Technical debt reduction
• Legacy application modernization progress
• Application modernization delivery rate
• Architecture roadmap completion
• Technology-standard adoption
• Reusable architecture component adoption
• API and integration reliability
• Integration error rate
• API performance
• Data integration accuracy
• Security architecture compliance
• Vulnerability remediation performance
• Identity and access-control compliance
• Disaster-recovery readiness
• Recovery testing performance
• Cloud architecture adoption
• Infrastructure and application cost efficiency
• Application deployment frequency
• Deployment success rate
• Change failure rate
• Automated testing coverage
• Observability coverage
• Application monitoring effectiveness
• Technical design quality
• Architecture documentation completeness
• Architecture decision-record compliance
• Solution delivery performance
• Vendor solution compliance
• Build-versus-buy evaluation quality
• Stakeholder satisfaction
• Engineering team satisfaction
• Architecture risk reduction
• Technical standards compliance
• Mentoring and capability development
• Technology innovation adoption

Ideal Candidate

The successful candidate should have strong experience in application architecture, software architecture, solution design, enterprise applications, cloud architecture, systems integration, or large-scale software engineering, preferably within a complex enterprise, technology, financial, commercial, or international business environment.

The candidate should demonstrate:

• Proven experience designing complex enterprise applications and digital platforms.
• Strong understanding of software architecture principles, patterns, and best practices.
• Experience developing scalable, secure, resilient, and maintainable application architectures.
• Strong knowledge of microservices, APIs, event-driven architecture, distributed systems, and integration patterns.
• Experience with cloud-native and hybrid application architectures.
• Strong understanding of application lifecycle management and modernization strategies.
• Experience working with relational and non-relational databases and data-access architectures