Director of Architecture - Tech Standards

Role Description:

The Director of Architecture exists to make it easier for engineers to do the right thing. The central architecture team succeeds only if it reduces cognitive load for Business Units and makes engineers’ lives easier in practice. The role leads Booking.com’s enterprise architecture and owns the architectural standards and Tech Guiding Principles that guide it, ensuring they create sensible defaults, reduce cognitive load, and align with the company’s strategic and technology direction. The Tech Guiding Principles are shaped as a company-wide effort, bringing together architects, principal engineers and senior technical leaders from across Booking.com. The role is not to define the Tech Guiding Principles in isolation, but to bring together the strongest ideas emerging across the Business Units and turn them into a shared technical direction for Booking.com.

The role leads a central team of Enterprise Architects and senior technical individual contributors, while working across Booking.com to align Business Units on shared architectural direction, sensible defaults and long-term technology choices. It combines direct leadership of a senior architecture team with influence in a federated organisation, and is accountable for turning central architecture capability into measurable impact across the company.

The Director of Architecture plays a leading role in defining Booking.com’s technology enablement model for how teams build, deliver, secure, and run software. Working with Business Units, Building & Running, Core Platforms, Developer Experience, Security and other foundational teams, the role defines the defaults, shared foundations and operating model that reduce friction across the Software Development Lifecycle and Product Delivery Lifecycle.

The role also helps define how AI changes the way teams design, build, test, release and operate software. This includes identifying where AI can accelerate delivery, improve quality and reduce repetitive work, while ensuring teams have the right feedback loops, safety measures and platform capabilities to adopt it well at scale.

The Director of Architecture ensures enterprise direction is grounded in practical delivery needs and reflected in how teams build and run software, working through Business Unit architecture teams and senior engineering leaders. Success depends on understanding the pressures Business Unit leaders and engineering teams are under, and using that understanding to make central architecture feel like support rather than interference. The role does not replace solution architecture within the Business Units; it provides enterprise direction, cross-BU standards, interoperability principles and clear decision-making frameworks to reduce friction, avoid unnecessary coupling, and support engineering velocity. Where risk, regulation and compliance demand it, particularly in domains such as FinTech, the role helps ensure the right controls are built into the defaults, tooling and delivery workflows so teams can stay compliant without unnecessary manual gates.

The role also helps Booking.com deal pragmatically with its existing technology estate. Success is not measured by perfect consistency or full compliance everywhere, but by using data and judgment to help teams fix the biggest risks, reduce the most harmful complexity and improve the parts of the estate that matter most.Key Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a central team of Enterprise Architects and senior technical ICs, setting clear expectations, building a strong senior team and creating the conditions for high impact.
• Act as a connected leader by developing senior talent, building trust across organisational boundaries, and creating alignment through empathy, service, and influence rather than authority.
• Define and evolve Booking.com’s enterprise architecture, architectural standards and Tech Guiding Principles in line with strategic priorities