Chief Architect & Technology Strategy Leader

KnowledgeCity; Pakistan; On-site; PKR 4,800,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

KnowledgeCity is seeking a Lead Software Architect to own architecture strategy for the Technology Division, shaping target architecture, roadmaps, and non-functional envelopes while guiding cross-domain system designs and architecture reviews.

The role governs architectural artefacts, migration plans, and debt management, while coaching Software Architects and aligning with security, infrastructure, and QA teams. 18+ years of experience and cloud/security expertise are required.

Qualifications

• 18+ years of experience.
• Expert in software architecture, design patterns, and SaaS application design.
• Expert in API and integration contract design (REST, GraphQL, gRPC, event-driven) and data architecture and modelling.
• Expert in non-functional requirements engineering — performance, reliability, and cost.
• Advanced cloud, platform, and security architecture, including threat modelling — AWS required, OCI a strong plus.
• Expert in architecting agent configuration and training, with advanced agent skill design, guardrail engineering, and prompt engineering for system design.
• Expert in technical decision-making and arbitration, with advanced experience leading senior technical individuals and negotiating roadmap with stakeholders.
• Expert in architecture documentation and ADRs, with advanced executive communication of technical risk.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the division target architecture and the architecture roadmap that gets us there.
• Own the technology radar: which languages, frameworks, datastores, and platforms are adopt, trial, assess, or hold.
• Set non-functional requirement envelopes — latency, throughput, availability, unit cost, data residency — and enforce them at design time.
• Maintain the Architecture Decision Record corpus as the division source of truth for why things are the way they are.
• Own the system-of-systems view: service boundaries, integration contracts, event flows, and shared data models across all domain teams.
• Arbitrate cross-domain design disputes and boundary ownership questions.
• Review and approve designs for anything that crosses a domain boundary, touches shared infrastructure, or introduces a new external dependency.
• Own architecture-level migration and decommissioning plans for legacy systems.
• Own the Architect agent — define, train, and continuously improve its skills so it produces designs that conform to the target architecture and NFR envelopes.
• Encode architectural guardrails, decision heuristics, and rejection criteria into the agent so non-compliant designs are caught before human review.
• Audit Architect agent output through structured spot checks; feed findings back into agent skills.
• Set the standard for how the Software Architects operate their agents, and review their agent skill definitions.
• Line-manage, coach, and develop the Software Architects.
• Chair the Architecture Review Board; set its cadence, entry criteria, and decision rights.
• Ensure the Software Architect coding standards stay coherent with the target architecture.
• Own architecture onboarding and levelling for the function; grow the bench.
• Own the division technical debt register: quantify it, prioritise it, and negotiate paydown into the roadmap.
• Partner with the Information Security and GRC Lead on security-by-design and threat modelling at the architecture layer.
• Partner with the Infrastructure Manager and Platform Lead on capacity, cost, and reliability architecture.
• Partner with the QA Lead on testability as an architectural property.
• Report architecture health, risk, and debt position to the Head of Engineering and the Technology Division Manager.

Skills

Software architecture

Design patterns

SaaS design

API design

Data modelling

Data architecture

Non-functional requirements

Cloud architecture

Threat modelling

Executive communication

Technical decision-making

Agent configuration

Job description

KnowledgeCity is seeking a Lead Software Architect to own architecture strategy for the Technology Division, shaping target architecture, roadmaps, and non-functional envelopes while guiding cross-domain system designs and architecture reviews.

The role governs architectural artefacts, migration plans, and debt management, while coaching Software Architects and aligning with security, infrastructure, and QA teams. 18+ years of experience and cloud/security expertise are required.