Lead Architect

Monizze; Brussel; Hybrid; EUR 110,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work days

Homeworking flexibility

Company car

Mobility budget

Annual trip

Health insurance

Learning opportunities

Internal mobility

Work from abroad

Job summary

Monizze is seeking an Architecture Lead to shape the evolution of its multi-product platform and drive agentic coding across the engineering organization.

You will lead through influence, define ADRs, and align teams around shared standards while coaching Engineering Managers. Fluency in English and French or Dutch is required, with Belgian roots and a dynamic, informal atmosphere.

Qualifications

• Experience in software architecture and system design at multi-product scale.
• Led adoption of agentic coding and context engineering in a team.
• Fluent in English and French or Dutch; strong communication across stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Keep architecture coherent across products and explain decisions to teams.
• Drive Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) and enforce standards via CI and reviews.
• Lead the architecture community with workshops, reviews, and decision sessions.
• Turn tech watch into decisions and maintain a living tech radar.
• Lead the shift to agentic coding and mentor engineers to become multipliers.

Skills

Architecture leadership

Software architecture

System design

Cross-team collaboration

English fluency

French or Dutch

Tools

PHP/Laravel

Vue/TypeScript

React Native

Relational databases

REST APIs

Docker

Messaging queues

Job description

About Monizze

Monizze is a Belgian HR tech and fintech scale-up of ~150 people, and the challenger in employee benefits and flexible compensation. We issue meal, eco and gift vouchers and help employers build flexible pay packages (cafeteria plan, mobility budget), all on one multi-product platform that handles regulated payments. We move faster than the incumbents, and we're growing fast.

Our mission: turn complex reward topics into simple, usable solutions, a win-win for workers and employers.

Your advantages first

Your purchasing power is optimized – the motto is true for clients & employees
30 days off per year: 20 legal holidays + 6 ADV/RTT + 4 Monidayzz
A mobility budget / A company car
Homeworking flexibility with days of remote work and a monthly allowance to make it comfy
Work from abroad up to 4 weeks a year (after 6 months @ Monizze)
Belgian roots, mindset & attitude: a cool and informal atmosphere – one of the best things since waffles
Disrupting and innovative: we digitalized the market and keep pushing innovation in every aspect
Your growth is our growth: unlimited learning opportunities (languages, personal growth, hard skills,...)
Your health and your family's health is covered by our hospitalization insurance
Internal mobility is regularly an option for anyone looking to evolve or change jobs or departments
Homeworking opportunities and overall flexibility
A yearly trip with all your colleagues to celebrate our achievements
We do much more for our employees, but we needed space to describe the job! We'd love to tell you about it though, so ask us!

Engineering at Monizze

Our engineering organisation is built around agentic coding : our engineers don’t just write code, they lead their agents. Skills, agents and context files are versioned and reviewed with the code. Our standards and Architecture Decision Records are written for people and agents alike. Engineers join each initiative at discovery, alongside Product and UX, and them own its design, build, testing and after-care. Two engineering teams are each led by an Engineering Manager, who coaches +/-7 engineers, makes sure the quality holds and drives agentic adoption engineer by engineer. The Delivery Manager makes sure that what we commit to ships on time and as pitched. The Lead Architect owns the architecture direction and the ADRs and sets the framework for agentic coding. Principal Engineers act as the referents for each stack. One quality bar applies to everyone: be proud of what you ship, and AI-generated code meets the same standard as any other code.

The role

You make sure Monizze's software evolves in one coherent direction, written down and usable by humans and agents alike.

You lead through influence: you stay hands-on, close to the code and the engineers, and your authority comes from the quality of your decisions, the clarity of the standards and the trust you earn.

What You’ll Do

Keep the architecture coherent across products

• carry the target architecture (multi-product, shared foundations) and make it understandable to everyone, not only to the people who drew it

• own the cross-cutting topics: API contracts, gateway and partner API versioning, orchestration vs. choreography, new service vs. new domain

• join discovery when an initiative goes beyond our agreed ecosystem or spans several stacks, so structural choices are known before the pitch

• surface structural projects early, and bring done is done discipline to migrations: frozen scope, explicit go, a closing criterion

• take on critical pieces yourself when complexity or urgency calls for it, including during incidents

Drive architecture decisions

You turn structural choices into Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), keep that base current with the help of Principal Engineers, and make sure every team and agent follows it. You design how each decision is enforced; Engineering Managers check conformity in their teams.

• spot early where a structural choice is needed and propose the decision

• maintain two sets of ADRs: a short, curated Target that every new component must follow, and a Baseline for existing code that grows one agreed decision at a time

• run the ADR lifecycle, from proposal and review with the relevant engineers to decision and publication , and superseding with a new ADR when a decision changes

• attach an enforcement mechanism to every ADR (CI, agent skill or PR review) and have every repo declare which rules apply, so CI and agents load the right ones

• build consensus among engineers and, when they can't agree, frame the options for the CTO to decide

Turn tech watch into decisions

Tech watch means turning what’s relevant into concrete proposals.

• keep a living tech radar (Adopt / Trial / Assess / Hold), the entry point for any new technology discussion

• run timeboxed experiments with a clear question: successes become an ADR, a standard or a skill, failures get documented too

• bring in external experts when useful, and make sure their findings end in a decision, not a report

Lead the shift to agentic coding

Move the team from developers who write code to engineers who lead their agents. You set the direction and the framework; the Principal Engineers build the skills, agents and tooling within it.

• define and regularly revisit the approach: what agents are used for, how, and with which guardrails on critical code (security, payments, card data)

• make the standards agent-ready and sponsor the CI steps and review agents that check PRs against them

• make the skills and agents landscape converge (shared vs. repo-specific) without killing bottom-up initiative

• drive adoption through demos, pairing and onboarding from day one, and track a few meaningful indicators to adjust the course

Lead the architecture community

• run workshops, reviews and decision sessions with Principal Engineers and Software Engineers: the standards are theirs, you make them happen

• explain the why behind decisions, not only the what, to Product, leadership and business stakeholders

• work closely with the CTO, the Delivery Manager and the Engineering Managers to follow-up on architecture risks, experiments and tech debt

What this role doesn’t hold

• you don't manage people: coaching and performance sit with the Engineering Managers

• you don't own delivery, feature design or product priorities. You review and challenge, you don't take over

• you don't have the final say on contested decisions: the CTO arbitrates

• you're not a gatekeeper on every PR. Within the standards, engineers decide

What stays yours: whether structural choices are made before the code, whether disagreements actually get decided, and whether engineers see you as a multiplier, not a bottleneck.

What we’re looking for

• You have already held an architecture role, by title or de facto (for example as a startup CTO, or as an engineering manager who also owned the architecture).

• You have strong experience in software architecture and system design, ideally on multi-product platforms with shared foundations, API contracts and partner integrations.

• You have already led the adoption of agentic coding in a team. You practise it daily and understand context engineering, skills, review loops and their limits.

• You read, challenge and write code on our stack (PHP/Laravel, Vue/TypeScript, React Native, relational databases, REST APIs, Docker, message queues).

• You have aligned several teams around shared standards without hierarchical authority.

• You have recorded decisions in ADRs (or an equivalent) and made standards enforceable through CI, linters and architecture tests.

• You have a solid general knowledge of cloud infrastructure, security and CI/CD. Experience as an infrastructure architect is a plus.

• Experience with payments or other regulated environments (PCI DSS, ISO27001) is a plus.

• You are fluent in English and in French or Dutch

Your profile

• Hands-on: you run POCs and spikes regularly, and you take on the critical pieces yourself, whether they are complex or urgent. In a crisis, you're in the room helping to fix it, not watching from the side.

• Pragmatic: you balance target vision with legacy reality.

• Curious but structured: you separate hype from what's useful and prove it with a timeboxed experiment.

• A facilitator: you turn a disagreement into clear options and explain a decision to a non-technical audience.

• A multiplier: engineers come to you because it helps them move faster.

Why join Monizze?

Monizze sits at the intersection of purchasing power, payments, mobility and employee benefits. A Belgian challenger with genuine ambition and the pace to match. You'll shape how a regulated, multi-product platform evolves, and lead a whole engineering team into agentic coding while the practices are still being written.

Two outcomes are always valid here: change the standard, or follow it. If you want to keep the first possible and the second clear, let's talk.