Solution Architecture Lead (f/m/d)

Information technology accompanies the route of every GLS parcel: a parcel from a grandma in Hamburg to her grandson in Sicily. Entire goods delivered from manufacturers to retailers. Whether it is parcel routing or an API – there is always highly developed IT behind it. GLS IT is responsible for the tools and systems involved. Our employees organize the IT for more than 860 million parcels in 40 country subsidiaries and partners at over 1600 locations.

Job Overview

We are looking for a Solution Architecture Lead to build and lead a team of Solution Architects while driving the evolution, resilience, and reliability of our system landscape.

Working closely with Enterprise Architecture, you translate long‑term target architecture into pragmatic guidance and ensure consistent adoption. Furthermore, Solution Architecture and Product share accountability for building sustainable and scalable solutions, balancing business needs with technical excellence.

A core part of your mission is strengthening Business Continuity, High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and NIS2 compliance across critical systems. You establish measurable reliability practices and drive architectural improvements that increase system availability and reduce operational risk.

You combine strategic thinking with hands‑on technical depth, providing guidance in the design of scalable, secure, and fault‑tolerant cloud‑native distributed systems. Demonstrated experience improving availability and resilience of complex distributed systems in production environments is essential.

The role reports directly to the Senior Manager Engineering Germany and offers significant influence on architectural standards, reliability maturity, and technical decision‑making across the organization.

Responsibilities and Duties

• Build, lead, and develop a high‑performing team of Solution Architects
• Own the Solution Architecture vision, strategy, and roadmap across multiple engineering domains in close alignment with Enterprise Architecture
• Drive end‑to‑end architectural alignment across business capabilities, ensuring that solutions work seamlessly across different domains
• Actively manage, reduce, and control technical debt to maintain long‑term agility and system health
• Proactively evolve architecture and platforms to enable the rapid and reliable delivery of future business features
• Drive measurable improvements in system availability and resilience by defining and enforcing architectural standards for high availability, disaster recovery, business continuity, and risk management (including NIS2)
• Establish measurable reliability practices, including resilience reviews, maturity assessments, and failure testing
• Provide hands‑on guidance to product teams and engineers designing and building scalable, secure, cloud‑native, and fault‑tolerant distributed systems
• Ensure strategic and technical alignment between Engineering, Enterprise Architecture, Security, and Product while promoting modern architectural patterns and governance (e.g., event‑driven systems, domain‑driven design, API‑first)

What we need

• Degree in computer science or equivalent professional background
• Several years of experience in Software or Solution Architecture
• Leadership experience (e.g., team lead, chapter lead, technical lead, architecture manager)
• Strong hands‑on background in software engineering with modern programming languages, cloud platforms (AWS or Azure) and distributed systems
• Understanding of architecture concepts for high availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity
• Ability to balance speed of delivery with system robustness while managing technical debt to align long‑term architectural health with short‑term business goals
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills
• Strategic mindset combined with practical execution capability
• Excellent English skills (written and spoken)
• Willingness to travel occasionally within Europe