Lead Enterprise Architect

Lead Enterprise Architect

Materialise

Leuven, Belgium

As a member of the IT Management Team, the Lead Enterprise Architect plays a critical role across both the central IT organization and the different business units. You provide architectural leadership for the core enterprise processes and systems (Salesforce, Microsoft, AWS), translating business strategy into a coherent target architecture and long-term architectural direction. In this role, you shape long-term architectural vision, ensure cross-domain consistency and personally lead selected domain-level activities. You work closely with the domain architects to bridge business demand and IT execution and enable agile delivery across central IT and business unit teams.

What you will do

Enterprise architecture leadership

• Define, own, and continuously evolve the Enterprise Architecture vision, target state, and principles;
• Maintain enterprise-wide capability maps and translate them into architectural direction;
• Establish and enforce architectural guardrails to guide decision-making across teams;
• Ensure alignment between business strategy, IT strategy, and architecture evolution.

Portfolio and investment alignment

• Shape and support demand intake and portfolio prioritization from an architectural perspective;
• Define and maintain the architecture runway to enable business initiatives and support business agility;
• Ensure alignment between portfolio investments and target architecture;
• Advise on trade-offs between business value, technical sustainability, and complexity.

Domain-level engagement

• Guide and coach domain architects, ensuring consistency across domains;
• Facilitate alignment across enterprise platforms and BU-specific solutions;
• Ensure solution designs contribute to an integrated and coherent enterprise landscape;
• For selected domains, act directly as a domain architect: creating roadmaps, maintaining standards, facilitating solution alignment.

Integration and standards

• Govern enterprise architecture standards and guardrails, ensuring interoperability, scalability, and security across IT and BU-delivered systems;
• Ensure end-to-end architectural alignment across central enterprise systems and BU-specific systems, enabling an integrated enterprise landscape;
• Embed non-functional requirements (e.g., performance, scalability, security, maintainability) by design, ensuring reliable, secure, and cost-effective operations.

Solution selection leadership

• Oversee solution evaluation processes for major enterprise and cross-BU systems;
• Ensure solution selection decisions align with strategic roadmaps, architectural principles, and long-term sustainability.

Agile architecture enablement

• Act as a senior leader of the Architecture Enabling Team — embedding agile activities where needed to support delivery: supporting teams in backlog refinement and solution design, participating in PI Planning and Preparation, shaping the architecture runway and enablers;
• Foster an agile, just-enough architecture approach that avoids stage-gate delays and heavy upfront design while maintaining alignment with strategic direction.

Your profile

• At least 5 years of proven experience in enterprise-level architecture leadership in complex, multi-BU environments;
• Strong skills in business capability modeling, architecture road mapping, and strategic portfolio alignment;
• Strong facilitation skills; able to translate business goals into actionable design guardrails;
• Strong people and team leadership skills, with demonstrated experience in influencing, coaching, and aligning teams through non‑hierarchical influence as well as direct line management;
• Strong ability to influence senior business and IT stakeholders;
• Knowledge of agile frameworks (e.g., SAFe, LeSS) and their architectural roles;
• Good, professional communication skills English.