Director of Architecture - Tech Standards

The Director of Architecture exists to make it easier for engineers to do the right thing. The central architecture team succeeds only if it reduces cognitive load for Business Units and makes engineers’ lives easier in practice. The role leads Booking.com’s enterprise architecture and owns the architectural standards and Tech Guiding Principles that guide it, ensuring they create sensible defaults, reduce cognitive load, and align with the company’s strategic and technology direction. The Tech Guiding Principles are shaped as a company-wide effort, bringing together architects, principal engineers and senior technical leaders from across Booking.com. The role is not to define the Tech Guiding Principles in isolation, but to bring together the strongest ideas emerging across the Business Units and turn them into a shared technical direction for Booking.com.

The role leads a central team of Enterprise Architects and senior technical individual contributors, while working across Booking.com to align Business Units on shared architectural direction, sensible defaults and long-term technology choices. It combines direct leadership of a senior architecture team with influence in a federated organisation, and is accountable for turning central architecture capability into measurable impact across the company.

The Director of Architecture plays a leading role in defining Booking.com’s technology enablement model for how teams build, deliver, secure, and run software. Working with Business Units, Building & Running, Core Platforms, Developer Experience, Security and other foundational teams, the role defines the defaults, shared foundations and operating model that reduce friction across the Software Development Lifecycle and Product Delivery Lifecycle.

The role also helps define how AI changes the way teams design, build, test, release and operate software. This includes identifying where AI can accelerate delivery, improve quality and reduce repetitive work, while ensuring teams have the right feedback loops, safety measures and platform capabilities to adopt it well at scale.

The Director of Architecture ensures enterprise direction is grounded in practical delivery needs and reflected in how teams build and run software, working through Business Unit architecture teams and senior engineering leaders. Success depends on understanding the pressures Business Unit leaders and engineering teams are under, and using that understanding to make central architecture feel like support rather than interference. The role does not replace solution architecture within the Business Units; it provides enterprise direction, cross-BU standards, interoperability principles and clear decision-making frameworks to reduce friction, avoid unnecessary coupling, and support engineering velocity. Where risk, regulation and compliance demand it, particularly in domains such as FinTech, the role helps ensure the right controls are built into the defaults, tooling and delivery workflows so teams can stay compliant without unnecessary manual gates.

The role also helps Booking.com deal pragmatically with its existing technology estate. Success is not measured by perfect consistency or full compliance everywhere, but by using data and judgment to help teams fix the biggest risks, reduce the most harmful complexity and improve the parts of the estate that matter most.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a central team of Enterprise Architects and senior technical ICs, setting clear expectations, building a strong senior team and creating the conditions for high impact.
• Act as a connected leader by developing senior talent, building trust across organisational boundaries, and creating alignment through empathy, service, and influence rather than authority.
• Define and evolve Booking.com’s enterprise architecture, architectural standards and Tech Guiding Principles in line with strategic priorities and long-term technology direction.
• Lead the Tech Guiding Principles as a company-wide effort, bringing together architects, principal engineers and senior technical leaders to identify the strongest ideas emerging across the Business Units and turn them into shared technical direction and sensible defaults for Booking.com.
• Play a leading role in defining Booking.com’s technology enablement model for how teams build, deliver, secure, and run software across the company.
• Define the defaults, shared foundations and operating model for software delivery at Booking.com, working with Business Units, Building & Running, Core Platforms, Developer Experience, Security, and other foundational teams.
• Improve engineering velocity by reducing avoidable coupling, duplication and ambiguity, and by embedding sensible defaults into shared platforms, tooling, guardrails, and reusable patterns.
• Lead the definition of how Booking.com’s SDLC and Product Delivery Lifecycle should evolve as AI changes the way software is designed, built, tested, released, and operated.
• Provide architectural direction on how AI is used across design, development, testing, release, operations and continuous improvement, with the goal of accelerating delivery, improving quality and making work easier for engineers.
• Align enterprise architecture with Business Unit solution architecture, ensuring local decisions support interoperability, reduce friction and maintain long-term technology coherence where it matters.
• Drive greater interoperability across Business Units and systems through clear architectural boundaries, interfaces, contracts and decision rights.
• Establish clear decision-making frameworks, default paths and exception mechanisms that allow teams to move quickly within clear architectural guardrails.
• Use data and pragmatic judgment to help teams identify and fix the most important risks in the existing technology estate, rather than driving for theoretical consistency everywhere.
• Maintain and evolve the Tech Radar to guide technology choices and investment in future-fit capabilities and patterns.
• Provide enterprise architecture oversight in regulated and high-risk domains, ensuring compliance and risk requirements are met through automated, scalable defaults rather than manual gates.
• Partner with strategy, product and business leaders to identify future capability needs and reflect them in Booking.com’s enterprise architecture and technology direction.
• Define metrics that measure the impact of enterprise architecture on engineering speed, delivery quality, interoperability, resilience, operational health, and risk reduction.

Experience and Skills

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