Application Architect

Pierre & Vacances–Center Parcs Group (PVCP), the European leader in holiday accommodation, brings together some of the tourism industry's most iconic brands—Pierre & Vacances, Center Parcs, maeva and Adagio—with operations across France and internationally, including Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Denmark.

What you will do

Application architecture and cross-domain coherence. Curate application-level standards and reference patterns. Be the trusted expert teams consult on cross-domain design. Make integration patterns coherent and maintainable across the systems portfolio.

Application landscape stocktake and risk prioritisation. Conduct an honest inventory of the existing application portfolio across the IT departments. Identify and prioritise architectural risks (technical debt, end‑of‑life systems, integration brittleness, security and compliance exposure, AI‑readiness gaps). Maintain the resulting risk register as a living artefact, and feed it into the multi‑year roadmap and budget cycles co‑authored with the Group CTO. This is the foundational body of work for the first year and the basis on which much of the technology investment plan will be built.

AI architecture. Provide architectural advice on AI integration into applications: feature design, agentic tooling patterns, the security baseline for AI artefacts, and the architectural implications of LLM‑based components. The choice and integration of agentic harnesses, including the runtime patterns that turn LLMs into productive agents inside our application landscape, is an area this role will shape in close partnership with the Group CTO. Not data science or ML platform work; this is the application side of AI.

Architecture governance. Run the advice process at scale: convene the Architecture Advice Forum where significant proposals are presented, prepare and lead architecture reviews on delegation from the Group CTO, surface cross‑team patterns from the body of decisions. Arbitrate at group scope only when consensus cannot be reached. Build the case law of architecture decisions teams reference and learn from.

Technical advisory. Pair with teams on hard design problems. Raise architectural maturity through reviews, pairing, and communities of practice. This is hands‑on, not a memo factory.

What success looks like

Six months in. First‑cut application landscape stocktake delivered, with a prioritised architectural risk register the Group CTO can take into budget conversations. ADR practice (structured, colocated with application repositories) live across the IT departments. AAF cadence established with a regular rhythm of significant proposals reviewed. A textual C4 modelling baseline prototyped on at least one flagship system.

Twelve months in. Top‑priority risks from the stocktake reflected in the multi‑year roadmap and in the next budget cycle. A growing body of architecture decisions accumulating as case law across all five IT departments. Fitness functions running in CI on at least two flagship services, covering structural integrity, external API conformance, and partner integration contracts. AI integration patterns documented and adopted by multiple product teams.

Eighteen months in. Recognised internally as the trusted technical adviser on architecture across the Group. Risk register live and refreshed as a working artefact, with measurable reduction on the highest‑priority items. Architecture maturity visibly improved at the team level (ADRs are written without prompting, fitness functions catch real regressions, the AAF runs on its own momentum).

Authority and governance

The role operates within the Group CTO’s three‑tier governance model (team scope, domain scope, group scope, differentiated by blast radius). Within that:

• Prepares and leads architecture reviews at domain and group scope, on delegation from the Group CTO.
• Has visibility on technical reviews and design discussions across IT departments and is expected to engage where cross‑domain implications arise.
• Captures architectural decisions made through the advice process, so they accumulate as precedent.
• Arbitrates at group scope only when consensus cannot be reached, and never as a default.
• Works alongside Platform Engineering at the application/infrastructure boundary.