Technical Architect

About dunnhumby dunnhumby is the global leader in Customer Data Science, helping the world's most ambitious retailers and brands put the customer at the heart of every decision. With nearly 3,000 experts across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, we partner with iconic businesses like Tesco, Coca-Cola, Meijer, Procter & Gamble and Metro to turn data into growth, innovation and measurable value for their customers. Tesco Media Tesco Media is the ultimate media partner to brands. Built on unrivalled customer insight, it’s a media owner with soul, scale, and storytelling power. Tesco Media helps brands and agencies connect meaningfully with customers, drive creative effectiveness, and grow at the point of purchase. About the Role We are looking for an Technical Architect to join our engineering organization and help shape the future of our SaaS platform. Our platform powers retail media solutions for global retailers and CPGs, enabling end-to-end advertisement campaigns across e-commerce sites, in-store channels, and social media platforms. This role is pivotal in defining architectural guardrails, frameworks, and patterns that enable multiple squads to deliver scalable, reliable, and secure solutions. You will combine hands-on technical depth with the ability to influence and align engineering managers, lead engineers, and product leaders. This is not an ivory-tower role — you will actively partner with teams, ensuring architecture decisions are practical, business-aligned, and execution ready. What You'll Be Doing • Architectural Leadership: Define and evolve application architecture in line with business and product strategy for a global retail media SaaS platform. • Set Guardrails: Establish repeatable patterns for microservices, APIs, identity/auth, observability, and data flows. • NFR Ownership: Ensure non-functional requirements (scalability, reliability, resiliency, observability, security, maintainability) are embedded into design decision. • Cross-Squad Influence: Collaborate with multiple squads (frontend, backend, BFF, platform services) to align on architectural choices. • Tech Evaluations: Lead structured assessments of new tools and frameworks (e.g., OPA, SpiceDB, caching, API gateways) and guide adoption. • Decision Frameworks: Move teams away from ad-hoc debates by creating clear frameworks for architectural decision-making. • Mentorship: Partner with engineering managers and lead engineers to strengthen design-level thinking and technical maturity. What We’re Looking For • Strong hands-on expertise across modern application architecture • .NET Core, C#, REST APIs, microservices. • Event-driven architectures (Pub/Sub, Kafka, or similar). • Databases (Postgres, SQL Server, caching strategies with Redis or Couchbase). • Identity & authorization frameworks (Auth0, OPA, SpiceDB, OpenFGA). • Observability platforms (New Relic, Prometheus, Grafana). • Cloud-native experience (GCP preferred; AWS/Azure acceptable). • An understanding of AI-enabled application patterns and workflow orchestration frameworks. • Awareness of emerging AI and agentic workflow technologies and their application across retail media, advertising, analytics, and SaaS platforms, with the ability to assess their architectural implications and business value • Strong track record of embedding NFRs into platform and product design. • Excellent communicators can simplify trade-offs for both engineers and business stakeholders. • Experience influencing without authority and driving closure across multiple teams. You'll Thrive If You ... • Enjoy solving complex technical and organisational challenges. • Can balance long-term architectural vision with practical delivery needs. • Build strong partnerships across engineering, p