Senior Audit & Transformation Architect

Context and purpose

The mission aims to provide independent expertise in auditing and transforming the tax application portfolio. It seeks to assess the robustness, relevance, and sustainability of existing and future solutions, to manage technical debt and architectural risks, and to inform investment and transformation decisions.

The Senior Audit & Transformation Architect defines realistic and controlled pathways to sustainably improve the resilience, performance, security, maintainability, operability, and scalability of the information system. They act as a key contact for management, architects, program managers, business units, technical teams, and external partners.

Main activities

• Conduct technical and architectural audits of existing solutions, solutions under development, or solutions offered by service providers.
• Establish objective diagnoses relating to technical debt, critical dependencies, structural limits, performance, resilience, security, maintainability and operability.
• Evaluate the alignment of architectures with business objectives, regulatory constraints and the architectural principles.
• Identify and prioritize architectural risks and their business, technical, budgetary and operational impacts.
• Define target architectures, transformation scenarios and migration or modernization trajectories.
• Conduct impact, opportunity and risk analyses to inform the decisions of governance bodies.
• Challenge the choices and estimates proposed by external service providers.
• Conduct or contribute to architectural reviews and formalize decisions, conditions, reservations and action plans.
• Support the teams in implementing the recommendations and verify that they are effectively taken into account.
• Measure the results obtained and adapt the recommendations when the findings, constraints or priorities change.
• Contribute to the analysis of complex technical incidents when their causes may be architectural.
• Clearly present the options, compromises, risks, costs and consequences to facilitate decisions.

Minimum experience required:

• At least ten years of relevant experience in application architecture, including several years in audit, transformation or architectural governance roles.
• At least three significant missions involving architectural audits, technical debt diagnostics, or the transformation of complex systems.
• Demonstrated experience in defining modernization pathways and presenting them to decision-making bodies.
• Experience in challenging service providers, evaluating solutions and following up on recommendations.
• Experience in a public, regulated, or similarly complex environment.

Expected deliverables:

• Architectural audit and diagnostic reports, including findings, evidence, risks and prioritized recommendations.
• Mapping of components, flows, dependencies, obsolescence and risks.
• Existing and target architectural plans.
• Comparative transformation scenarios and decision support files.
• Modernization roadmaps, migration pathways and technical debt reduction plans.
• Documented architectural decisions, technical opinions and review reports.
• Action plans with priorities, responsibilities, conditions for success and verification criteria.

SOFT SKILLS:

• Ability to distinguish between structural issues and secondary topics and to prioritize actions.
• Critical thinking, independence of judgment and ability to formulate well-supported recommendations.
• Ability to model, diagram and explain complex systems.
• Ability to present options, trade-offs, risks and costs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to challenge constructively and gain buy-in around architectural decisions.
• Business focus, solutions and results.
• Rigour, autonomy, method and a sense of quality.
• Ability to work in a multidisciplinary environment and to manage several simultaneous requests.

Evaluation method:

• Analysis of the application file and answers to specific questions.
• Written test based on an audit and transformation case, followed by an interview for shortlisted candidates
• The evaluation will focus in particular on the ability to objectify a diagnosis, prioritize risks, compare scenarios and defend a realistic trajectory.

Skills: 

• IT Business Architect
• Analysis of technical debt, architectural risks and critical dependencies
• Architecture of transformation, modernization and rationalization of application assets
• Distributed architecture: microservices, SOA, APIs, integration and event-driven architectures
• Auditing complex application architectures and objective diagnosis
• Containerization, orchestration, CI/CD, data and complementary technologies
• Performance, resilience, security, maintainability and operability assessment
• Enterprise Java environments: Java, Jakarta EE/JEE, Spring Boot and web services
• Architectural governance, facilitating reviews and decision support
• Architectural modeling: UML, ArchiMate or equivalent