Senior Enterprise Architect

Cohesion X Pty; Pretoria; On-site; ZAR 1,100,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Job summary

Cohesion X Pty in Pretoria is seeking an experienced Enterprise/Platform Architect to lead architectural decisions for enterprise-scale cloud-native systems. You will own reference architectures, ensure alignment with security and governance, and drive architecture across product teams under CTO guidance.

You bring 7+ years in software architecture, hands-on experience with Azure and AWS, and a track record of designing scalable, regulated systems.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in software architecture and enterprise systems.
• Experience as architecture authority on scalable platforms.
• Comfortable in Azure, AWS and other hyperscale environments.
• Experience with POPIA/regulatory data-residency considerations.

Responsibilities

• Lead reference architectures and artefacts for enterprise systems.
• Architect for cloud-native SaaS platforms and distributed stacks.
• Engage with CIOs and engineers to discuss costs, limits, and risks.
• Ensure architecture is practical, well-explained, and followed.

Skills

Enterprise architecture

Azure

AWS

Security/compliance

Distributed systems

API design

Platform engineering

Job description

Head Office - Pretoria Full-time Posted August 12, 2026

Who you will work with

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.

How you work

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.

What we are looking for

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.

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.

What success looks like

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.

The process

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.