Hybrid Lead Architect

at Catena

• Job title: Lead Architect
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, Cloud, Distributed Systems, JavaScript, Next.js, Node.js, Postgres, React, Redis, WordPress
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Gzira, Malta

About the role

• Lead Architect responsible for technical direction at Catena Media. Aligning architectural vision across departments and ensuring scalable, coherent solutions.

Responsibilities

• Own the overall technical architecture of Catena Media, defining the target state for platforms, systems, and integrations and guiding the organisation towards it through clear principles and roadmaps.
• Ensure cross-department architectural alignment, working with Engineering, Product, Marketing, Data, SEO, Analytics and other teams so that solutions fit together into a cohesive ecosystem rather than isolated projects.
• Bridge communication between technology and business stakeholders by translating business strategy and objectives into pragmatic technical capabilities and architectural choices.
• Clearly explain technical trade-offs, set realistic expectations, and guide stakeholders towards options that maximise long-term value.
• Define and govern architecture standards and guidelines (patterns, integration approaches, data flows, security and compliance considerations, SLAs, quality attributes) and ensure they are understood and applied consistently.
• Provide architectural leadership on key initiatives that span multiple domains, such as platform consolidation, shared services, tracking and attribution, identity and consent, content platforms, and data/analytics capabilities.
• Act as a multiplier for technical leadership by coaching and developing Tech Leads and Engineering Managers, helping them make sound architectural decisions within their own domains.
• Facilitate architectural decision-making, running architecture reviews, design sessions and RFC processes that balance speed, quality, and risk, and ensure decisions are documented and communicated.
• Champion simple, value-driven solutions, avoiding unnecessary complexity, preferring incremental evolution over big-bang rewrites, and focusing on measurable business outcomes.
• Maintain a broad technical view of our ecosystem, understanding how web platforms, backend services, data pipelines, tracking, integrations, and third-party tools fit together end-to-end.
• Collaborate closely with data and analytics teams to ensure data is modelled, collected, and exposed in ways that enable performance tracking, experimentation, and business insights.
• Promote a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning, encouraging experimentation and innovation where it adds value, knowledge sharing across teams, and continuous improvement of our architecture and engineering practices.

Requirements

• Proven experience in a senior architecture role (Lead Architect, Head of Architecture, or similar) in a multi-team, multi-product environment.
• Demonstrate a broad technical background spanning enterprise and distributed systems, modern web architectures, data platforms and engineering, integrations, APIs, and event-driven/service-oriented architectures.
• Apply strong grounding in architecture disciplines including system design, integration patterns, domain-driven thinking, scalability, performance, reliability, security, and compliance.
• Deep knowledge of iGaming, particularly the affiliate business model – how traffic, tracking, attribution, revenue share, CPA and hybrid deals work end to end.
• Experience in a similar role at an iGaming affiliate or operator is a strong plus.
• Ability to see the bigger picture, connecting individual projects into a coherent platform and making trade-offs that optimise for long-term business value.
• Comfortable working with a tech stack that includes modern web technologies, backend services and data platforms (e.g. React/Next.js, Node.js/ NestJS, PostgreSQL, Redis, queues, AWS, Cloudflare, WordPress or similar).
• Familiarity with DevOps practices (CI/CD, observability, Infrastructure-as-Code, cloud-native architectures) and how they influence architectural choices.
• Strong understanding of data flows in an affiliate context: tracking, tagging, event collection, identity and consent, reporting and dashboards.
• Demonstrate excellent communication and mentoring skills, influencing and aligning senior stakeholders across technology and business.

Benefits

• Continuous learning and knowledge sharing
• Encourage innovation and experimentation
• Growth opportunities within the organization