Sr. Staff Architect
Gap Inc. · Hyderabad
About the Role
As a Senior Staff Architect, you are a high-impact individual contributor responsible for designing robust and scalable solutions within a domain stream. You bring deep technical and functional expertise and partner with cross-functional teams to define and implement architecture that supports business and technical objectives. Department: Enterprise ArchitectureRole : Senior Staff Enterprise Solution Architect
Employment Type : Full- Time
Location: Hyderabad, India (HDC)
This role is focused on hands-on solution design, documentation, and delivery — with increasing influence across products, platforms, and governing teams.
You bring deep expertise in retail and consumer goods, partnering with cross-functional business, product, and engineering teams to define and implement architecture that is robust, scalable, and aligned to both business and technical objectives.
You serve as a bridge between architecture and engineering leadership, ensuring consistency, quality, and performance of solutions. As AI reshapes how software is designed and delivered, you will play an active role in embedding AI-driven thinking into architecture practices and championing adoption across your domain.
What You'll Do
Solution design & documentation
Design and document end-to-end solutions for key initiatives within your domain, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture standards and business needs.
Project architecture leadership
Lead architecture for individual projects and features, guiding engineering teams through solution execution and well-reasoned technical trade-offs.
Cross-functional collaboration
Partner with strategy teams, product managers, architects and engineers to translate requirements into scalable, maintainable architecture complaining to EA guidelines. Provide architectural input across multiple simultaneous initiatives.
Quality, feasibility & integration alignment
Ensure technical feasibility, performance, and integration alignment of solutions with adjacent systems and domains. Participate in defining, enhancing and ensuring design and code reviews to uphold architectural quality.
Architecture framework & reusability
Contribute to the evolution of architecture frameworks, reusable components, and reference implementations that raise the bar across the engineering organisation.
Planning, estimation & technology evaluation
Engage in early project planning and estimation through an architecture lens. Stay current with emerging technologies and help evaluate their applicability within your domain.
AI ADOPTION
Identify and drive opportunities to integrate AI and ML capabilities into enterprise domain solutions to enhance business value and operational efficiency.
Serve as a strategic advocate for responsible, ethical, and compliant AI adoption across the domain architecture landscape.
Lead the execution and advancement of enterprise architecture strategies in alignment with the vision and direction established by Principal Architects.
ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE COLLABORATION
Hands-on solution design and delivery within a domain stream. Operationalises enterprise guidance into project-level architecture.
Alignment with Principal & Sr Principal Architects:
Engage regularly with Principal and Senior Principal Architects to ensure domain-level solutions are grounded in enterprise architecture strategy. Consume and operationalise enterprise standards, patterns, and guardrails into project-level designs, and surface domain-specific insights that inform broader strategic decisions.
Cross-domain architecture reviews:
Participate in architecture review boards and cross-domain design forums facilitated by Principal Architects. Represent your domain's perspective, highlight integration touch-points, and collaborate on solutions that span multiple domain streams.
Feedback loop & pattern sharing:
Maintain a continuous feedback loop with the EA team — sharing reusable patterns, lessons learned, and implementation experiences from domain delivery that can be elevated into enterprise-wide frameworks and reference architectures.
Strategic roadmap contribution:
Contribute domain-level input to enterprise technology roadmaps and strategic initiatives led by Senior Principal Architects. Help bridge the gap between long-term architectural vision and near-term delivery realities within your domain.
SaaS Vendor Product Evaluations:
Collaborate with Principal Architects and product stakeholders to ensure recommended SaaS choices are grounded in both domain delivery needs and long-term enterprise architecture direction.
Who You Are
Seasoned technologist with strong architectural thinking and a solid background in hands-on software or platform engineering.
Deep understanding of at least one architectural Product to Market domain stream, with the ability to contribute meaningfully to cross-domain conversations.
Able to manage and prioritise multiple concurrent initiatives, providing architectural support from planning through to delivery.
Experienced engaging with senior architecture leadership — comfortable consuming enterprise strategy from Principal and Senior Principal Architects and translating it into grounded, deliverable domain solutions.
Skilled at producing technical documentation and architecture artifacts that clearly communicate design intent to both Strategy, Business, Engineering and non-technical stakeholders.
Collaborative and delivery-oriented, with a track record of working closely with cross-functional product and engineering teams.
Strong attention to detail with a passion for quality, performance, and reusability; capable of independently solving architectural challenges and escalating when cross-functional coordination is needed.
SaaS Vendor Evaluations - Translate SaaS market evaluations into well-reasoned architectural recommendations with clear trade-off analysis : Cost & TCO over time, Scalability & performance, Integration complexity, Vendor maturity & stability, Enterprise standards alignment, PoC / reference validation
Eager to learn, grow, and actively contribute in defining and adopting enterprise architectural practices and patterns across the organisation.
Comfortable navigating the nuances of responsible AI adoption — including data privacy, model governance, and balancing innovation with risk.
A trusted voice within the EA community — able to represent domain interests in broader architecture forums while remaining open to enterprise-wide direction and standards.
Curious about AI and its practical application in enterprise architecture — whether through predictive analytics, generative AI, ML-powered features, or AI-augmented engineering workflows.