Principal Architect | Strategic Enterprise Architecture

Company Description

About NIQ: NIQ is a leading global consumer intelligence company, helping clients understand what is happening, why it is happening, and what they should do next. Our data, technology, AI, and analytics capabilities power decision-making for some of the world’s most important consumer, retail, and technology businesses. 

AI is central to NIQ’s next stage of growth. We are building trusted, scalable, and high-impact AI capabilities that transform how insights are created, delivered, and adopted across the business. This role will help shape the platforms, operating model, and leadership system needed to make that ambition real. 

Job Description

Our NielsenIQ Technology teams are building and evolving Connect, a unified, global, open data ecosystem powered by AI, cloud and on-premises technologies. Clients around the world rely on NielsenIQ data and insights to innovate and grow. As a Principal Architect within the Enterprise Architecture team, you will define architecture for key components and capabilities across NIQ platforms, ensuring alignment with business strategy, product objectives, technology standards, and the long-term platform vision. You will partner with architecture peers, Product and Operations leaders, engineering leaders, and development teams to take solutions from initial requirements through design, delivery, and production operation. A key focus of this role is shaping the responsible adoption of Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, and agentic AI across the enterprise. The successful candidate will combine broad enterprise architecture experience with practical knowledge of AI-enabled systems and will grow into an end-to-end platform architect as their knowledge of NIQ's platforms expands.

Role Mandate: Act as the strategic Enterprise Architecture partner and single point of architecture accountability for an assigned NIQ product portfolio. The role connects business and product strategy to target-state architecture, capability ownership, technology roadmaps, governed standards, and delivery feedback. It is intentionally strategic while remaining close enough to Product, Engineering, Solution Architecture, and Architecture Practice teams to ensure that direction is actionable and produces measurable outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Own and maintain the portfolio target-state architecture and rolling three-year technology roadmap, aligned with business priorities, product strategy, engineering plans, and enterprise transformation goals.
• Serve as the named strategic architecture partner and single point of EA accountability for the assigned portfolio, building trusted working relationships with Product, Engineering, Operations, Data Science, Security, and business leadership.
• Create and maintain business-capability, domain, application, data, and platform maps that expose ownership, dependencies, duplication, maturity gaps, lifecycle risk, and opportunities for simplification or growth.
• Translate strategic priorities into clear architecture outcomes, transition states, investment options, sequencing recommendations, and measurable decision criteria.
• Guide platform-placement and build-versus-buy decisions, balancing enterprise reuse and standards with appropriate portfolio autonomy, speed, cost, resilience, and client commitments.
• Define and contribute reusable reference architectures, patterns, guardrails, and decision trees, including patterns for AI, Generative AI, agentic AI, data, integration, cloud, security, and observability.
• Drive adoption of approved architecture standards and bring standards, reference architectures, major exceptions, and cross-functional decisions through the lightweight EA governance process for ratification.
• Own visibility of portfolio architecture risks, strategic exceptions, technical debt, capability gaps, and cross portfolio dependencies; ensure actions, owners, and escalation paths are clear.
• Partner with the Solution Architecture pillar to triage architecturally significant demand, shape initiatives early, and ensure delivery-level learning feeds back into portfolio strategy, standards, and roadmaps.
• Assess emerging technologies and market shifts, especially AI and agentic commerce, and convert relevant signals into adoption guidance, controlled experiments, investment recommendations, and roadmap implications.
• Enable self-service architecture by creating high-quality, reusable content for NIQ architecture knowledge repositories and supporting AI-enabled access to standards, patterns, decisions, and portfolio views.
• Establish and run an effective operating cadence, including strategic portfolio reviews, intake alignment with Solution Architecture, reference artifact alignment with the Architecture Practice, and architect-only sessions to drive capability and domain consistency.
• Define outcome-oriented measures for the portfolio, such as roadmap adoption, reuse, simplification, risk reduction, decision cycle time, standards adoption, and value realized from technology investments.
• Support M&A due diligence and integration planning by assessing capability fit, architecture compatibility, technology risk, redundancy, security considerations, and potential integration paths.
• Mentor architects and engineering leaders, communicate complex decisions clearly, and influence across organizational boundaries without relying on direct authority.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of progressive experience across software engineering, solution architecture, platform architecture, or enterprise architecture, including significant experience with enterprise-scale products and data platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to define target-state architectures and multi-year technology roadmaps, and to connect them to business capabilities, product objectives, investment decisions, and executable transition plans.
• Experience operating as a strategic advisor to senior Product, Engineering, Technology, Operations, or business leaders, with evidence of influencing decisions across multiple organizations and geographies.
• Strong knowledge of capability-based planning, domain and platform mapping, application rationalization, technology lifecycle management, technical debt, and architecture risk management.
• Experience creating and driving adoption of enterprise standards, reference architectures, reusable patterns, architecture decision records, and governance processes that are pragmatic and lightweight.
• Strong understanding of modern cloud, data, integration, API, security, resilience, observability, and distributed system architecture, preferably in Microsoft Azure and hybrid environments.
• Knowledge of AI, Generative AI, and agentic AI architectures, including model and tool integration, retrieval augmented generation, orchestration, context and memory, evaluation, guardrails, observability, human oversight, and Responsible AI controls.
• Ability to assess emerging technologies and develop clear build-versus-buy, adoption, migration, and total-cost of-ownership recommendations.
• Experience partnering with Solution Architecture and delivery teams on architecturally significant initiatives while preserving a strategic, portfolio-wide perspective.
• Excellent written, visual, and verbal communication skills, including the ability to express complex architecture choices as concise options, trade-offs, decisions, roadmaps, and executive-level narratives.
• Proven facilitation, stakeholder management, negotiation, and conflict-resolution skills, with the ability to establish accountability and progress in a matrixed organization.

Preferred Experience: 

• Experience in data, analytics, measurement, consumer intelligence, retail, media, or other information intensive product environments.
• Knowledge of ArchiMate, capability-based planning methods, and enterprise architecture repositories such as ADOIT.
• Experience with product operating models, agile delivery, portfolio planning, FinOps, and outcome-based technology investment governance.
• Experience supporting technology due diligence, post-merger integration, platform consolidation, or large-scale modernization and simplification programs.
• Hands-on engineering or architecture experience with APIs, Python, databases, data pipelines, cloud-native platforms, MLOps or LLMOps, or enterprise AI platforms such as Azure AI Foundry and Azure OpenAI.
• Thinks in business capabilities, portfolios, platforms, and multi-year outcomes rather than isolated projects.

Successful Profile: 

• Balances enterprise consistency with purposeful autonomy and avoids governance for its own sake.
• Creates clarity from complexity, makes decision ownership explicit, and converts strategy into reusable architecture assets.
• Builds trust through early engagement, pragmatic recommendations, transparent trade-offs, and reliable follow-through.
• Uses delivery feedback to continuously improve target states, standards, patterns, and investment guidance.

Additional Information

Our Benefits

• Flexible working environment
• Volunteer time off
• LinkedIn Learning
• Employee-Assistance-Program (EAP)

NIQ may utilize artificial intelligence (AI) tools at various stages of the recruitment process, including résumé screening, candidate assessments, interview scheduling, job matching, communication support, and certain administrative tasks that help streamline workflows. These tools are intended to improve efficiency and support fair and consistent evaluation based on job-related criteria. All use of AI is governed by NIQ’s principles of fairness, transparency, human oversight, and inclusion. Final hiring decisions are made exclusively by humans. NIQ regularly reviews its AI tools to help mitigate bias and ensure compliance with applicable laws and regulations. If you have questions, require accommodations, or wish to request human review were permitted by law, please contact your local HR representative. For more information, please visit NIQ’s AI Safety Policies and Guiding Principles: https://nielseniq.com/global/en/info/niqs-ai-safety-policies/

About NIQ

NIQ is the world’s leading consumer intelligence company, delivering the most complete understanding of consumer buying behavior and revealing new pathways to growth. In 2023, NIQ combined with GfK, bringing together the two industry leaders with unparalleled global reach. With a holistic retail read and the most comprehensive consumer insights—delivered with advanced analytics through state-of-the-art platforms—NIQ delivers the Full View™. NIQ is an Advent International portfolio company with operations in 100+ markets, covering more than 90% of the world’s population.

For more information, visit NIQ.com

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Our commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

At NIQ, we are steadfast in our commitment to fostering an inclusive workplace that mirrors the rich diversity of the communities and markets we serve. We believe that embracing a wide range of perspectives drives innovation and excellence.  All employment decisions at NIQ are made without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws. We invite individuals who share our dedication to inclusivity and equity to join us in making a meaningful impact. To learn more about our ongoing efforts in diversity and inclusion, please visit the https://nielseniq.com/global/en/news-center/diversity-inclusion