Senior Architect Audit

Senior Architect – Audit & Transformation

Duration: 12 months

Language: French

Contract: Freelance

About the assignment

For a large public-sector organisation in Belgium, we are looking for a Senior Architect – Audit & Transformation.

The role focuses on the assessment, modernisation and transformation of a complex and business-critical application landscape. You will provide independent architectural and technical expertise, conduct audits, identify technical debt and architectural risks, and define realistic transformation and modernisation roadmaps.

You will act as a senior architectural advisor to management, architects, programme managers, business stakeholders, technical teams and external partners.

The overall objective is to improve the resilience, performance, security, maintainability, operability and scalability of the organisation's IT landscape.

MUST-HAVE SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

Candidates must demonstrate the following:

• 10+ years of relevant experience in application and/or enterprise architecture.
• Several years of experience in architectural audit, transformation and/or architectural governance.
• At least 3 significant assignments involving:
  • Transformation of complex IT systems
  • Strong expertise in technical debt analysis, architectural risks and critical dependencies.
• Proven experience with application landscape modernisation, transformation and rationalisation.
• Proven ability to define target architectures, transformation scenarios and migration roadmaps.
• Strong knowledge of distributed architectures, including:
  • Microservices
  • SOA
  • APIs
  • Event-driven architectures
• Strong experience with Java enterprise environments, including:
  • Java
  • Jakarta EE / JEE
  • Spring Boot
  • Web services
• Experience with containerisation, orchestration and CI/CD.
• Strong understanding of performance, resilience, security, maintainability and operability.
• Experience with architectural governance, architecture reviews and decision-making processes.
• Proven experience challenging and assessing external suppliers and proposed technical solutions.
• Experience presenting architectural options, trade-offs, risks, costs and recommendations to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience with architecture modelling, such as UML, ArchiMate or an equivalent methodology.
• Experience within a public-sector, regulated or similarly complex environment.
• Fluent French is mandatory.

Key responsibilities

• Conduct technical and architectural audits of existing, ongoing or proposed solutions.
• Assess technical debt, critical dependencies, structural limitations and architectural risks.
• Evaluate architecture against business objectives, regulatory requirements and organisational architecture principles.
• Identify and prioritise architectural risks and assess their business, technical, operational and financial impact.
• Define target architectures and realistic transformation, migration and modernisation strategies.
• Perform impact, opportunity and risk analyses to support governance and investment decisions.
• Challenge technical choices, solutions and estimates proposed by external suppliers.
• Lead or contribute to architecture reviews.
• Document architectural decisions, technical recommendations, conditions, risks and action plans.
• Support teams in implementing architectural recommendations and verify their effective adoption.
• Monitor results and adjust recommendations when priorities, constraints or findings change.
• Contribute to the analysis of complex technical incidents where architectural root causes may be involved.
• Clearly communicate options, trade-offs, risks, costs and consequences to facilitate decision-making.
• Technical and architectural audit reports, including findings, evidence, risks and prioritised recommendations.
• Application and architecture landscape maps.
• Documentation of components, data flows, dependencies, obsolete technologies and risks.
• As-is and target architecture documentation.
• Modernisation roadmaps and migration strategies.
• Documented architecture decisions and technical opinions.
• Architecture review reports and meeting outcomes.
• Action plans including priorities, responsibilities, success criteria and verification mechanisms.
• Strong analytical and critical-thinking skills.
• Independent judgement and ability to provide well-founded recommendations.
• Ability to model,