Our client is a global leader in premium media and entertainment, operating at scale across the creation, production, and distribution of digital content. The organisation is widely recognised for its creative output and global reach, with its technology function playing a central role in enabling the full lifecycle of content—from initial development and production through to post-production, distribution, and global delivery.
The technology organisation supports world-class storytelling by delivering secure, scalable, and highly automated production workflows. It leverages modern cloud-native architectures, data platforms, artificial intelligence, media asset management systems, and advanced post-production tooling to enable creative teams to work efficiently at global scale. Cloud infrastructure, particularly AWS, underpins much of this ecosystem, providing elastic compute, media processing, storage, and global delivery capabilities that ensure performance, resilience, and cost efficiency.
The Head of Architecture is responsible for defining, evolving, and governing enterprise and solution architecture across the technology landscape. This role establishes architectural vision, principles, standards, and reusable reference architectures that guide engineering teams in building secure, scalable, and resilient platforms and products.
Reporting into senior technology leadership, the role provides architectural leadership across multiple domains, ensuring alignment with broader enterprise architecture and group technology strategy. It plays a key part in shaping the long-term technology roadmap in partnership with Product, Engineering, and Delivery leaders, balancing innovation with operational stability, cost efficiency, and delivery velocity.
A core responsibility is ensuring that engineering execution aligns with architectural intent. This includes leading design assurance processes, reviewing solution designs, and maintaining governance over non-functional requirements such as security, scalability, availability, performance, observability, sustainability, and regulatory compliance. The role also oversees the management of technical risk, architectural debt, and dependency complexity across a distributed global engineering environment.
In addition, the Head of Architecture drives consistency in engineering best practices across cloud-native development, AI, DevOps, platform engineering, and API-first design. Strong emphasis is placed on AWS services and patterns, including microservices architecture, containerisation (EKS/ECS), serverless computing (Lambda), infrastructure-as-code (CloudFormation/Terraform), and data-driven architecture to support modern media workflows.
Beyond technical leadership, the role requires strong governance and stakeholder engagement. The Head of Architecture represents the organisation in senior architecture and engineering forums, influencing strategic decisions and ensuring clarity of trade-offs between speed, cost, risk, and long-term sustainability. The role also ensures architectural standards are embedded consistently across global delivery teams.
A key aspect of the position is capability development. The successful candidate will help build a high-performing architecture and engineering community, fostering continuous learning, technical excellence, and knowledge sharing. This includes mentoring senior engineers and architects, strengthening leadership capability, and supporting long-term talent development.
The ideal candidate will bring deep experience in enterprise and solution architecture within large-scale, complex environments, ideally within media, entertainment, or similarly sophisticated digital organisations. They will possess strong hands-on expertise across modern cloud platforms, particularly AWS, and a proven track record of delivering cloud-native transformation programmes.
We are particularly interested in speaking with experienced Lead Architects, Principal Architects, or senior technical leaders who are operating at that level and are ready to take the next step into a Head of Architecture position. Candidates who have demonstrated architectural leadership, influenced technology strategy, and successfully partnered with engineering and product organisations at scale will be well positioned for success in this role.
Professional certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, or equivalent cloud architecture qualifications are highly desirable, alongside broader architecture frameworks such as TOGAF or similar.
Strong stakeholder management, excellent communication skills, and the ability to translate complex architectural concepts into clear, actionable direction are essential. The successful individual will be a strategic thinker with strong commercial awareness, able to balance agility with governance and long-term platform sustainability.
This is a high-impact leadership opportunity for a collaborative and forward-thinking technology leader who thrives in complex, global environments and is passionate about enabling creative outcomes through modern, scalable, cloud-first technology platforms. It offers an excellent opportunity for an accomplished architect—or an exceptional Lead Architect ready for their next career step—to shape the future architecture strategy of a world-class media and entertainment organisation.
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