Senior Solution Architect - Railway Infrastructure
Industry: Railway / Transportation
Location: Brussels About the Role
We are looking for an experienced Senior Solution Architect to join the ICT department of a major organization in the railway infrastructure sector. You will work on a major project covering applications and systems supporting railway infrastructure management, train traffic planning and infrastructure works planning across the Belgian railway network. These applications are business-critical, supporting planning teams, signaling stations and Traffic Control, with 24/7 operational support. As Solution Architect, you will be responsible for defining, documenting and governing the solution architecture, ensuring alignment with business requirements, enterprise architecture principles, technical standards and cybersecurity requirements. The role combines architectural expertise with strong technical knowledge. You should be able to assess existing code, challenge technical decisions and work effectively with engineering teams to ensure that proposed architectures are realistic and implementable.
Key Responsibilities
* Analyze business requirements, stakeholder needs and functional and non-functional requirements.
* Assess the existing architecture and define the target solution architecture.
* Design and compare architectural scenarios, evaluating feasibility, costs, risks, benefits and trade-offs.
* Define application, integration, data, infrastructure and security architecture.
* Develop and maintain the technical architecture roadmap, including legacy system evolution and platform modernization.
* Ensure alignment with enterprise architecture principles, technical standards and cybersecurity requirements.
* Identify architectural gaps, dependencies, technical risks and transition requirements.
* Guide development, engineering, integration, testing, security and operations teams during implementation.
* Participate in technical refinement sessions and conduct targeted code reviews.
* Perform architecture and implementation compliance reviews.
* Build and maintain architecture models using ArchiMate, preferably in Sparx Enterprise Architect.
* Document architectural decisions, maintain traceability between requirements and solutions, and facilitate knowledge transfer.
Technical Environment
The solution combines legacy systems and modern microservices technologies.
* Infrastructure: OpenShift, AIX, Oracle, Redis
* Backend: Java 8, Java 17-21, microservices
* Frontend: Angular 15 and 18, Swing
* Messaging & Integration: IBM MQ, Kafka
* Security: HashiCorp Vault
* Logging & Monitoring: Elastic
Experience with every technology is not mandatory. However, a strong understanding of distributed architectures, legacy environments, microservices and messaging mechanisms (MQ and Kafka) is essential.
Required Experience & Technical Skills
* At least 10 years of relevant IT experience, including solution architecture and information systems design.
* Proven experience as a Solution Architect on production systems.
* Strong knowledge of enterprise and solution architecture, architecture governance and requirements management.
* Experience with architecture modelling, ideally using ArchiMate.
* Ability to design architectures covering business, data, applications, integration and technology.
* Experience designing and integrating complex solutions involving multiple technical domains and stakeholders.
* Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, APIs, integration patterns, messaging and event-driven architectures.
* Knowledge of databases, data modelling, transactions, distributed caching and data consistency.
* Understanding of infrastructure, cloud, containerization, orchestration and deployment strategies.
* Knowledge of application security, authentication, authorization, secrets management and software supply chain security.
* Understanding of resilience, business continuity, performance, observability and operational requirements.
* Experience with architecture reviews, risk assessments and implementation governance.
* Previous hands-on software development experience, sufficiently recent to engage credibly with development teams. Nice to have:
* Practical knowledge of TOGAF; certification is an advantage.
* Knowledge of cybersecurity practices and IT service management frameworks.
Languages
* Fluent French and/or Dutch.
* Fluent English
