Senior Enterprise Architect

CohesionX; Pretoria; Hybrid; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Job summary

CohesionX is seeking an experienced architect to drive enterprise platform strategy under the CTO. You will partner with delivery and engineering leads, sit with the management team, and shape decisions that affect the entire company.

The stack is cloud-agnostic and hybrid, demanding deep AI architecture and governance across regulated environments. You will advocate practical reference architectures, balance cost and feasibility, and ensure the architecture remains actionable and

Qualifications

• Extensive experience as architecture authority on large-scale enterprise systems.
• Proven ability to design and communicate reference architectures.
• Experience navigating regulated industries and data residency requirements.
• Ability to balance business value with technical feasibility in customer discussions.
• Hands-on with AI-enabled platform design and evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Define and own reference architecture across product teams.
• Engage with CTO, delivery and engineering leads to shape platform decisions.
• Participate in customer calls and delivery stand-ups to address timing, cost and constraints.
• Lead architecture artefact creation and governance without blocking teams.
• Evaluate AI tooling and ensure governance, observability and resilience.

Job description

You will work across every product team in the business, under the direction of the CTO, alongside the delivery function and the engineering leads who own each platform. You will also sit with the management team, because platform decisions at this stage are company decisions.

The stack is cloud-agnostic and hybrid, running in production for enterprise customers across several sectors.

You are AI-native. Not AI-aware.

We are an AI company, so the bar is higher than being open to it. You know which tools do what, where each one falls over, and you pick the right one without being told.

The judgement stays yours. There are a hundred ways to design any of this and choosing between them is human work, so we are not looking for someone who asks a model what the architecture should be. But drawing it, generating options, stress-testing your own design, producing the artefacts: most of that should be AI-assisted. The gap between having the idea and having the reference architecture in front of a team should be hours.

If AI tooling is something you have read about rather than something you use every day, this is the wrong role.

7+ years in software, including significant time as the architecture authority on enterprise systems that shipped, scaled and stayed up. You are comfortable in Azure, AWS and other hyperscale environments. You have been through a customer security review and come out the other side.

Essential

• Depth across enterprise software, SaaS platforms, cloud-native and distributed systems, APIs, event-driven architecture and platform engineering
• Modern AI architecture in practice: LLMs, agent frameworks, orchestration, RAG, vector databases, evaluation, observability, MCP and tool integration, AI governance. This is what the platform is built on, so it is not a nice-to-have
• Reading someone else's estate. Given a customer's stack you work out how it actually hangs together and where the real constraints sit, which is rarely where the documentation says they are
• Holding both altitudes in one conversation. A CIO wants to know what this costs and what breaks. Their lead engineer wants to know about token limits and auth. Same call, five minutes apart
• Getting senior engineers to follow a reference architecture without having authority over them. That is done by being right, being useful and being in the detail with them, not by escalating
• Regulated or security-conscious customers: financial services, healthcare, mining, pharma, government. You understand POPIA and why data residency questions stall deals

Advantageous

• You love this stuff. You tinker, you build things nobody asked you to build, and you keep up with what is changing because it interests you rather than because it is on a roadmap
• Designing an architecture function from scratch rather than inheriting one
• Hybrid or customer-hosted deployment models
• Multi-product or multi-tenant platform companies

Titles matter less to us than what you have built. You may have been a Chief Architect, Principal Architect, Platform Architect, Staff+ engineer, Engineering, or CTO of a product company.

This is not a governance role. If the last few years of your career were framework documents, capability maps for their own sake and architecture review boards, this will frustrate you and you will frustrate us.

It is not a policing role either. You are not here to block teams. If your reference architecture is not being followed, treat that as a signal it is not good enough or not explained well enough, and fix it.

It is also not an ivory tower. You will be on customer calls, in delivery stand-ups, and sometimes in the detail of why an integration is timing out.

Multiple rounds, and one of them is a real architecture problem rather than a quiz. This is the most important hire we are making this year, so we would rather wait for the right person than move fast on the wrong one.