Lead Solution Architect

Bayer; Województwo mazowieckie; Hybrid; PLN 262,000 - 313,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical care

Flexible benefits

Insurance (life, accident, disability)

Pension plan

Home office allowance

Company car

Extra paid holidays

Job summary

Bayer is hiring a Lead Solution Architect in Poland with hybrid work options. You will lead design of end-to-end solutions, maintain architecture artefacts, and stay hands-on to drive delivery.

The role blends technical influence with business translation, risk management and cost awareness. Expect collaboration across product, engineering, data and platform teams, and the opportunity to shape platform strategy while enabling scalable architectures.

Qualifications

• Proven hands-on software engineering experience.
• Fluency with AI coding agents as everyday tooling.
• Prompt and context engineering; agentic workflows and tool orchestration.
• APIs and contracts: REST design, versioning and backward compatibility.
• Distributed systems in practice: idempotency, retries, backpressure, circuit breakers.
• Cloud and platform: containers and Kubernetes, IaC (Terraform, GitOps), CI/CD pipeline design.
• Observability: logs, metrics, traces and SLOs, and the related operational habits.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; leadership experience.

Responsibilities

• Design end-to-end solutions aligned with business requirements and platform strategy.
• Maintain target-state blueprints and architecture views; record architecture decisions.
• Stay hands-on: prototype, review code, and ship.
• Design bounded contexts and service boundaries for reusability across teams.
• Contribute reference components and golden paths to guide delivery teams.
• Provide architectural leadership across product, engineering, data and platform teams.
• Translate business priorities into solution requirements and architecture decisions.
• Define quality attributes, performance, security and risk considerations.

Skills

Hands-on engineering

AI agents

Prompt engineering

APIs & contracts

Distributed systems

Cloud & Kubernetes

Observability

Communication

Leadership

Security & compliance

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

GitOps

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Lead Solution Architect

At Bayer we’re visionaries, driven to solve the world’s toughest challenges and striving for a world where ,Health for all, Hunger for none’ is no longer a dream, but a real possibility. We’re doing it with energy, curiosity and sheer dedication, always learning from unique perspectives of those around us, expanding our thinking, growing our capabilities and redefining ‘impossible’. There are so many reasons to join us. If you’re hungry to build a varied and meaningful career in a community of brilliant and diverse minds to make a real difference, there’s only one choice.

At Bayer, we are committed to transparency, equal pay for equal work or work of equal value, and objective reward practices in line with EU and local regulations. The minimum monthly gross compensation for this role is 25 760 PLN, with final pay determined based on objective factors such as experience, qualifications, scope of responsibility, and internal alignment.

This position is eligible for variable pay components, such as performance-based bonuses, awarded in accordance with the applicable employee group, role scope, and compensation structure.

• Medical care above statutory requirements
• Flexible benefits supporting leisure, and well‑being/sports programs
• Life, accident, and disability insurance through group coverage
• Employer-supported pension plans with regular company contributions
• Home office allowance to support hybrid or remote work
• Company car provided (as a working Benefit)
• Extra Paid Holidays

Key Responsibilities Outputs

• Design and build end-to-end solutions
  • Lead the design of end-to-end solutions that meet business requirements and align with platform and enterprise strategy.
  • Maintain target-state blueprints, architecture views, integration patterns and Architecture Decision Records - recording the reasoning behind a decision, not only its outcome.
  • Stay hands-on: prototype, review code, and ship. Design authority in this role is earned through building, not asserted through governance.
• Composable and reusable by default
  • Design bounded contexts and service boundaries, so capabilities are reusable across teams rather than rebuilt per initiative.
  • Contribute reference components, patterns and golden paths that make the right architecture the path of least resistance for delivery teams.
  • Recognize when not to decompose. A modular monolith that ships beats a distributed system that does not.
• AI-native engineering
  • Apply prompt and context engineering, agentic workflows and tool orchestration as routine engineering practice.
  • Build and operate the engineering harness - evals, guardrails, CI gates - that makes autonomous work auditable and reversible.
  • Design retrieval and RAG where it earns its place, and say so when it does not.
• Technical leadership across teams
  • Provide architectural leadership across product, engineering, data and platform teams.
  • Coordinate decisions where several workstreams, systems or external partners must align.
  • Drive consistency across the whole solution stack rather than optimizing isolated components.
• Business and stakeholder translation
  • Work with business leaders, product managers and engineering teams to turn business priorities into solution requirements and architecture decisions.
  • Communicate direction, trade-offs, dependencies and risk clearly to technical and non-technical audiences alike.
  • Write design documents that survive review.
• Quality, security and risk
  • Define quality attributes and non-functional requirements: performance, resilience, scalability, supportability, security, availability
  • Identify architectural risk, constraints and dependencies early, and develop mitigation.
  • Ensure compliance with security standards, governance requirements and regulatory expectations, including validated-system design and audit trail where applicable.
  • Model cost and apply FinOps thinking to design decisions.
• Portability and technology selection
  • Evaluate and recommend technologies, frameworks and integration approaches from the approved technology portfolio.
  • Assess portability and lock-in explicitly. Proprietary orchestrators and cloud SDKs embedded in application code are lock-in; containers on open components are not.
  • Plan migrations using established patterns and decompose legacy estates without stalling delivery.
• Standards, mentorship and continuous improvement
  • Set standards without stalling teams - the balance is the skill.
  • Review designs and implementations for adherence to agreed principles and target architecture.
  • Mentor engineers and grow architects; lead architectural discussion in the open.
  • Track technology movement and continuously improve architectural process and practice.

Qualifications & Competencies & Skills

• Engineering — you build
  • Proven hands-on software engineering: you have written, reviewed and shipped production code, and still do.
  • Fluency with AI coding agents as everyday tooling, not as an experiment.
  • Prompt and context engineering; agentic workflows and tool orchestration.
  • APIs and contracts: REST design, versioning and backward compatibility, event contracts.
  • Distributed systems in practice: idempotency, retries, backpressure, circuit breakers.
  • Cloud and platform: containers and Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, GitOps), CI/CD pipeline design.
  • Observability: logs, metrics, traces and SLOs - and the operational habits behind them.
• Architecture — you design across boundaries
  • Strong grounding in architectural styles and design patterns, and the judgement to pick between them.
  • Domain-Driven Design and bounded contexts; C4 modelling for anything crossing a team.
  • Event-driven, serverless and managed-first design; microservices and modular monolith.
  • Trade-off analysis you can defend in review.
  • Legacy decomposition, strangler migration, multi-tenancy and high-volume ingest.
• Context — you carry the business with you
  • Ability to analyse complex business requirements and translate them into technical solutions.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication, including to non-engineers.
  • Security and compliance by design: AuthN/AuthZ, OAuth2/OIDC, threat modelling, privacy, data residency.
  • Proven leadership: driving architectural initiatives, mentoring engineers, and setting standards teams actually adopt.
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or a related field.
• Competencies
  • Digital Fluency Works effectively and responsibly with digital technologies and AI to create value, make informed decisions and collaborate in a data-driven way. Uses digital technologies, data and AI independently in novel situations to improve outcomes and ways of working beyond own tasks, within legal, ethical, security and compliance requirements.
  • Stakeholder Engagement Engages openly across diverse stakeholders to build trust, ensure clarity and create collective ownership of outcomes. Anticipates stakeholder needs and balances differing perspectives to achieve common goals.
  • Dealing with Ambiguity Operates effectively when situations are unclear, information is incomplete or conditions change unexpectedly. Brings structure to ambiguous situations, proposes practical options to test and learn, and decides soundly with limited information.
  • Business Acumen Understands how internal and external decisions impact value generation. Reviews and evaluates financial, strategic and market factors to guide decisions and create value.

Bayer welcomes applications from all individuals, regardless of race, national origin, gender, age, physical characteristics, social origin, disability, union membership, religion, family status, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression or any unlawful criterion under applicable law. We are committed to treating all applicants fairly and avoiding discrimination.

Bayer offers the possibility of working in a hybrid model. We know how important work-life balance is, so our employees can work from home, from the office or combine both work environments. The possibilities of using the hybrid model are each time discussed with the manager.

Bayer respects and applies the Whistleblower Act in Poland.

Location: Poland : Mazowieckie : Warszawa

Division: Enabling Functions

Reference Code: 890472