Chief Architect (AIR Lab)

Thales is a global technology leader trusted by governments, institutions, and enterprises to tackle their most demanding challenges. From quantum applications and artificial intelligence to cybersecurity and 6G innovation, our solutions empower critical decisions rooted in human intelligence. Operating at the forefront of aerospace and space, cybersecurity and digital identity, we’re driven by a mission to build a future we can all trust.

Responsibilities

Architecture strategy and roadmap

• Define the overall technology and architectural roadmap for the organization, and ensure alignment between IT strategy and business goals.
• Oversee all architectural domains — software, data, infrastructure and security — and ensure consistency and interoperability across all technology initiatives.
• Balance innovation with long-term stability and scalability, and drive enterprise-wide digital transformation.

Governance and technical decision-making

• Govern technology stack decisions, including frameworks, cloud, security and interoperability.
• Organize architecture boards or forums to drive cross-team alignment, and review and approve the tactical architecture decisions made by Tech Leads.
• Work with the AIR Lab Management Team to guide IT investments and innovation.

Cross-functional collaboration

• Work closely with the Chief Product Owner on product strategy to ensure feasibility and scalability.
• Partner with the Head of Engineering to balance architecture with delivery speed.
• Collaborate with Tech Leads and System Architects to ensure consistency across Agile Release Trains (ARTs) or teams.

Risk, mentoring and representation

• Identify systemic risks, including scalability bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities and vendor lock-in.
• Mentor senior engineers and architects and grow architectural capability across the lab.
• Act as a spokesperson for the organization’s technology vision externally, with customers, partners, research institutes and the wider ecosystem.

REQUIREMENTS:

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronics, Aerospace Engineering or a related technical field.
• Master’s degree or further training in software architecture, distributed systems, cybersecurity, systems engineering or a related discipline is desirable but not required.

Essential Skills/Experience

• Substantial experience as a Software, Solution or Enterprise Architect on complex, distributed, data-intensive systems, including accountability for architecture decisions across multiple teams or products.
• Proven ability to define and communicate a technology roadmap and to align it with business and product strategy.
• Deep, hands-on technical grounding: you have written and reviewed production code, and remain credible to senior engineers.
• Strong command of cloud and modern platform architecture, including containers, orchestration, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and the trade-offs between microservices, event-driven and monolithic approaches.
• Solid understanding of security architecture, identity and access management, secure-by-design principles and the compliance constraints of regulated environments.
• Experience with data architecture, including data modelling, streaming and messaging, interoperability standards and API design.
• Ability to establish and run architecture governance — boards, decision records, reference architectures, technology radars — without becoming a bottleneck to delivery.
• Ability to identify systemic risks such as scalability bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, technical debt and vendor lock-in, and to propose pragmatic mitigations.
• Ability to present, justify and negotiate architectural decisions with engineers, product management, executives and external stakeholders.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and architects and influencing technical direction without relying on direct authority.
• Willingness to learn Air Traffic Management concepts, including air traffic control workflows, ANSP (Air Navigation Service Provider) operations, FF-ICE (Flight and Flow Information for a Collaborative Environment), TBO (Trajectory Based Operations), flight planning and regional collaboration use cases.

Desirable Skills/Experience

• Prior exposure to Air Traffic Management, air traffic control, airline operations, aviation systems or other safety-critical, command-and-control or mission-critical domains.
• Experience with safety and certification standards relevant to ground ATM or aviation systems (for example EASA requirements, DO-278A/ED-109A, DO-326A or equivalent).
• Experience architecting for open architecture, service-oriented or federated systems, and for interoperability across organizational boundaries.
• Experience in an innovation lab, R&D or prototype environment, where architecture must support fast iteration without foreclosing future productization.
• Experience with SAFe, Agile Release Trains or comparable scaled agile delivery models.
• Experience with AI/ML platform architecture, digital twins, geospatial or simulation systems.
• Experience representing an organization externally — conferences, standards bodies, research consortia or customer-facing technical engagements.

Essential / Desirable Traits

• Systems thinking: you can hold the whole picture — products, data, infrastructure, security, people — and see how a decision in one domain propagates to the others.
• Strategic patience: you distinguish what must be right now from what can be deferred, and you resist both premature abstraction and short-term expedience.
• Technical credibility: engineers trust your judgement because you understand the detail, not just the diagram.
• Clarity and rigour: you make complex things easier to understand, and you document decisions clearly enough for others to build from them.
• Stakeholder confidence: you can explain, justify and negotiate architectural decisions with executives and engineers alike, without becoming defensive or vague.
• Pragmatism: you balance the ideal architecture against delivery reality, and you know when good enough is the right answer.
• Learning agility: you are willing to enter a difficult domain, ask good questions and build real understanding over time.

At Thales, we’re committed to fostering a workplace where respect, trust, collaboration, and passion drive everything we do. Here, you’ll feel empowered to bring your best self, thrive in a supportive culture, and love the work you do. Join us, and be part of a team reimagining technology to create solutions that truly make a difference – for a safer, greener, and more inclusive world.