Principal Enterprise Architect

The role of Principal Enterprise Architect at vector8 is key to ensuring our clients make better technology decisions—and turn those decisions into secure, scalable systems that work in the real world. The position is suited to a senior, technically deep Enterprise Architect who has built, integrated, and operated complex enterprise systems - and over the last few years has built credible AI expertise on top of that foundation.

Responsibilities

Working collaboratively with senior client stakeholders, the Principal Enterprise Architect will be the technical advisor of choice, elevating architectural quality across our client portfolio in Switzerland.  
This role is for a builder, with real engineering scars, who has actual world expertise with code, deployments, production incidents and integration battles - who has a demonstrable track record of shipping non-trivial enterprise systems into production. You will:  

• Carry pre-sales weight. When senior client stakeholders ask integration, deployment, and dependency questions, this person has lived the answers and earns trust without hesitation.
• Lift delivery quality. The bridge between “AI works in a notebook” and “AI is a real production system inside a regulated enterprise” is where projects slow down. The Principal Enterprise Architect will be someone who has crossed that bridge many times.
• Be the trust anchor. Working on strategic accounts the Principal Enterprise Architect will interact with senior stakeholders in the client’s technical organisation, becoming the go-to technical advisor, who earns the right to push back. 

Requirements

Mandatory Experience

You will have a minimum of 12 years professional experience working in complex environments with experience gained in a consultancy, agency, or system integrator environment.  

Mandatory Technical depth:

• You will have personally written and shipped production code. You will still read code routinely and can run a credible code review. 
• You will have personally led the integration and rollout of at least one enterprise-scale system end-to-end - ERP, CRM, core banking / insurance platform, or comparable. You will have done this as the builder/integrator, not as the strategy advisor watching from the side. 
• Your recent work will be on modern stacks (cloud-native, API-first, event-driven), not exclusively legacy migrations.
• You will have production experience leading solutions across several major categories of the enterprise stack (data stores, messaging / streaming, container platforms, integration middleware), not a single-platform career.
• You will be fluent across the major solution categories of a modern enterprise stack - data stores (OLTP, columnar, vector), messaging and streaming, container orchestration (k8s), identity, integration middleware. Essentially you will understand the first principles behind each category, knows the leading offerings in each, and will have hands-on production experience with at least one in most categories, while being conversant in all. 
• You will be able to run a credible technical design review - challenge engineers on substance, spot the real risk in a complex landscape diagram within minutes and own the architectural quality bar for the engagements.
• You can stand up a working prototype in days, not weeks - including with AI coding agents (Claude Code or similar) - and demo it credibly to a client’s tech lead. You will earn engineering trust by shipping something runnable, not slides.
• You will design right-sized solutions at two altitudes simultaneously - the enterprise-wide target picture and the specific application. You will knows when not to build, buy, or standardize. You will be allergic to both over-engineering and architecture-by-PowerPoint.

AI overlay (deliberate, recent, real):

• You will have actively upskilled into modern AI in the last 2–4 years - GenAI, RAG, agents, evals, deployment patterns
• You do not need to be an AI researcher but you will need to challenge our own AI engineers on substance and integrate AI credibly into enterprise architectures.

Advisor craft:

• You will be a strong storyteller - making complex technology feel simple to non-technical boards and defensible to technical CTOs
• You will be able to read the client’s environment fast - capabilities, institutional history, and preferences - and factor it into their proposals.
• You will have been the trusted external tech advisor for at least one senior client over multiple years.
• Languages: native or near-native German (Swiss German strongly preferred), business-fluent English.

Benefits

• Compensation & rewards: Competitive base salary with a variable performance-based bonus
• Work environment: Modern office in the heart of Zurich with access to an on-site gym, sports classes (yoga, pilates, spinning) and healthy snacks 
• Flexibility: Hybrid working model — balance remote work with in-office collaboration
• Learning & growth: Ongoing investment in your professional development, with clear opportunities to take on leadership.
• Parental leave: 16 weeks fully paid maternity leave, with a flexible 50% return-to-work option in the first month (while receiving full salary) and 4 weeks fully paid leave for the second parent
• Travel & mobility: Paid Halbtax travel card to support sustainable commuting
• Team & culture: Join a diverse, international team across 5 locations, with regular team events and opportunities for cross-border collaboration
• Recognition & rewards: Attractive referral bonuses for both candidate and client conversions.
• Our values: A culture grounded in inclusivity, curiosity, ownership, and collaboration — where your ideas shape the future of AI consulting.