Principal Architect | Strategic Enterprise Architecture

Job 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.  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. • 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