Platform Architect (Retail Media Platform)

Project overview

Platform Architect (Retail Media Platform)

About Pollen

Pollen is Nectar360's retail media platform, providing advertisers with a single front door into Nectar360's retail media portfolio.

The platform brings together campaign planning, inventory management, audience activation, measurement and reporting capabilities across multiple media channels and products.

As the platform continues to grow, maintaining consistency across domains, data models and engineering teams becomes increasingly important.

The Role

We're looking for an experienced Platform Architect to support the ongoing evolution of the Pollen platform.

You will work across multiple teams to define architecture standards, domain boundaries, data principles and target-state platform designs.

The role is well suited to someone who enjoys creating clarity across complex systems and helping teams make consistent technology and design decisions.

Responsibilities

Platform Architecture

Domain & Service Design

Data Architecture & Standards

Architecture Governance

Strategic Discovery & Technical Planning

Platform Evolution

Examples could include:

Engineering Collaboration

You'll Be Successful If You Have

Reasonable Adjustments:

Respect and equality are core values to us. We are proud of the diverse and inclusive community we have built, and we welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and perspectives. Our success is driven by our people, united by the spirit of partnership to deliver the best resourcing solutions for our clients.

If you need any help or adjustments during the recruitment process for any reason, please let us know when you apply or talk to the recruiters directly so we can support you.

• Define and maintain architecture blueprints for the Pollen platform.
• Support evolution of platform capabilities, services and integration patterns.
• Define target-state architectures and transition plans for major platform changes.
• Ensure changes align with wider architecture principles and technology standards.
• Help define and refine domain boundaries across Pollen products and services.
• Establish clear ownership models for services, capabilities and datasets.
• Identify and manage cross-domain dependencies.
• Promote architectural consistency across engineering teams.
• Define common data concepts and canonical models across the platform.
• Establish standards for campaign, audience, advertiser, asset and measurement data.
• Support data ownership and governance approaches.
• Review new data ingestion requirements and ensure alignment with platform standards.
• Contribute to data architecture decisions relating to platform evolution and modernisation initiatives.
• Create and maintain Key Design Decisions (KDDs).
• Produce Architecture Impact Assessments and High-Level Designs.
• Support architecture reviews and governance forums.
• Document options, trade-offs and architectural recommendations.
• Ensure teams are working within agreed standards and guardrails.
• Help translate product roadmaps and strategic objectives into a coherent technical investment plan.
• Assess current platform, PaaS and AI capabilities, identifying technical gaps, constraints, risks and foundational work.
• Frame key unknowns and lead targeted discovery, technical spikes or prototypes to reduce uncertainty.
• Map technical, cross-team and delivery dependencies, working across Product and Engineering to establish a realistic sequence of change.
• Assess the engineering skills, capabilities and indicative capacity required to deliver the roadmap.
• Evaluate build, buy, reuse and partner options, making clear recommendations based on value, risk, cost and strategic fit.
• Produce prioritised, evidence-based recommendations for Engineering and Product leadership.
• Support major transformation initiatives across the platform.
• Define transition architectures and migration approaches.
• Identify opportunities for simplification, standardisation and reuse.
• Help reduce technical debt and improve long-term maintainability.
• New data platform ingestion patterns
• Domain boundary refinement
• Platform modernisation initiatives
• Work closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers and Engineers during design and delivery.
• Provide architectural guidance and review solutions.
• Support teams in understanding impacts, dependencies and implementation approaches.
• Help resolve ambiguity where multiple systems or teams intersect.
• Experience working as a Solution Architect, Platform Architect or Domain Architect.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and platform architecture.
• Experience defining architecture standards and reusable design patterns.
• Strong data architecture and modelling experience.
• Experience working across multiple teams and products.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Ability to balance short-term delivery needs with long-term platform maintainability.
• Ability to structure ambiguous problems, ask incisive questions and turn incomplete information into clear hypotheses, discovery activities and decisions.
• Strong strategic and commercial judgement, including experience assessing build, buy, reuse and partner options.
• Confidence moving between strategic planning, hands-on discovery and pragmatic delivery support in a fast-moving environment.

Project details

• Start: ASAP
• Duration: 6 months
• Location: London, UK, GB
• Rate: 88-100 EUR/h