Engineering & Architecture Lead

PROJECT INFORMATION:

Industry: Manufacturing

Work model: Hybrid, Kraków, PL

Project language: English

Project length: 6 months contracts + prolongations

Start: ASAP

Assignment type: B2B

Summary: This position focuses on leading the technical direction and engineering standards for a strategic digital initiative. The primary goal is to implement a global, unified platform for industrial management, enhancing operational efficiency across various production lines.

We are hiring an Engineering / Architecture Lead to drive the technical direction and engineering standards of a strategic digital initiative. You will be shaping architecture decisions, guiding the development team, and ensuring delivery excellence (quality, CI/CD, security-by-design, and technical debt control). The role is currently focused on one project, with a clear path to evolve toward multi-project / multi-team technical leadership as the program scales.

About the Project:

This initiative is a strategic digital transformation program, aiming to deploy a global, unified platform for industrial management, monitoring, and analytics. The client operates over 150 manufacturing plants and 8,000 production lines worldwide. Each line is uniquely equipped with its own sensors, controllers, and automation logic. The platform bridges this diversity by providing a digital representation of the shop floor, capable of:

● Collecting, processing, and visualizing real-time production data directly from equipment,

● Providing role-based dashboards to operators, supervisors, and central teams,

● Enabling automated alerts to ensure reactivity and product compliance,

● Supporting historical data analysis for trend detection, root cause identification, and performance optimization,

● Standardised Traceability and Process Control solution for all production lines.

● Tracking energy usage in line with the sustainability goals.

The platform is built on a modular three-layer architecture (Edge, Plant, Cloud) and is designed to progressively replace legacy systems.

Beyond its technical scope, the program represents a cultural transformation, introducing a product-driven and data-centric mindset within a traditionally IT-oriented industrial environment. Its success depends on close collaboration with factory stakeholders, deep user understanding, and strong delivery discipline.

Responsibilities:

Missions Architecture & decisions

• Define, challenge, and arbitrate architecture and key engineering decisions, ensuring a coherent, scalable, and maintainable target architecture.

• Provide strong guidance on microservices and distributed systems (API design & contracts, async messaging, resilience patterns, observability).

• Set and enforce engineering standards (coding guidelines, definition of done, test strategy, code review expectations, maintainability).

Delivery & Engineering governance

• Lead a hybrid team (internal staff & partner) distributed across multiple sites.

• Own the engineering governance: technical rituals, decision logs, alignment, escalation, and continuous improvement.

• Drive technical debt management (identification, prioritization, remediation plan, and execution follow-up).

• Define and monitor engineering KPIs (quality, delivery reliability, predictability, velocity) and use them to improve the execution.

• Own the CI/CD build-out and ensure its implementation end-to-end (build, test, quality gates, security scans, deploy), ensuring reliability and maintainability.

• Work closely with Infrastructure and Security teams to ensure security compliance, automation, and cloud governance.

• Define and roll out a scalable engineering operating model (standards, templates, governance, quality gates) to support growth toward a broader “software factory / department” scope.

• Contribute to portfolio-level technical planning as the program scales (cross-project priorities, dependencies, and capacity alignment across teams/suppliers).

Technical leadership

• Act as the bridge between business stakeholders and the development team. Help in translating needs into actionable technical direction and trade-offs.

• Foster alignment across teams without direct hierarchical authority.

• Coordinate “Build & Run” expectations (availability, incidents, service quality) in partnership with the relevant run/infra teams.

Must Haves:

• Former software developer with strong engineering credibility, able to challenge design and code quality (not necessarily coding daily).

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, including 5+ years in technical leadership (Tech Lead, Lead Engineer, delivery-oriented Architect).

• Proven experience leading multiple engineering teams/squads (including suppliers) with 10+ people overall, driving execution and engineering quality standards.

• Cloud-native experience is mandatory: AWS or GCP (deployments, environments, governance basics).

• Strong command of the full SDLC and agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban).

• Ability to design, challenge, and justify complex architectural decisions.

• Expertise in CI/CD, DevSecOps, automation, testing, and application security.

• Solid understanding across backend, frontend, databases and data to challenge trade-offs and ensure end-to-end consistency.

• Ability to define a long-term technical vision and structure an actionable roadmap.

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence without authority and make decisions under uncertainty.

• The current project is built on .NET/C#: candidates should be comfortable operating in a .NET environment. A Java background is acceptable if the candidate has strong distributed-systems and cloud experience and can ramp up quickly on .NET.

• Experience deploying solutions in China is a plus.

• Exposure to Edge / OT / industrial environments is appreciated.

• Understanding of IS/IT environments: network, DMZ, security, cloud governance.

• High standards for quality, performance, and reliability.

• Strong focus on value, quality, and business impact.

• Resilience, adaptability, and a collaborative mindset.

• Comfortable with basic budget topics like effort tracking, cost drivers, and delivery efficiency.

Nice to Have:

• Experience deploying solutions in China.

• Exposure to Edge/OT/industrial environments.

• Understanding of IS/IT environments.

• Experience with basic budget topics.