Distinguished Architect, Software Delivery Engineering
Wolters Kluwer
Wolters Kluwer is a global leader in professional information, software solutions, and services for the health, tax & accounting, governance, risk & compliance, and legal & regulatory sectors. Wolters Kluwer is headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands. The Company serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries, and employs approximately 22,000 people worldwide. Every day, our customers make critical decisions to help save lives, improve the way they do business, and build better judicial and regulatory systems.
We are seeking a seasoned and visionary Distinguished Architect, Software Delivery Engineering to lead the evolution of our DevSecOps practices and Developer Platform across a global, complex, and highly diverse engineering organization. Reporting to the SVP, Engineering Excellence & Operations, this role will serve as a senior technical leader, change agent, and cultural influencer responsible for driving innovation, alignment, and consistency in how we build, test, secure, and deploy software at scale.
This role will influence our engineering footprint spanning over 9000 people (staff and contractors) across all Wolters Kluwer divisions and approximately 600 product applications. The role will co-lead our DevSecOps Center of Excellence in partnership with a peer from our Global Business Services (GBS) organization and will collaborate closely with divisional architects and stakeholders from quality, operations, and infrastructure.
This is a high-impact, hands-on leadership role for someone energized by complexity, driven by outcomes, and passionate about transforming software engineering through automation, platform thinking, and the application of modern tools — including GenAI.
Key Responsibilities:
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Strategic Leadership
- Define and drive the multi-year DevSecOps roadmap across a heterogeneous ecosystem of technology stacks and deployment models.
- Co-lead the DevSecOps Center of Excellence in partnership with the IT and operations architect from GBS.
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Developer Platform Ownership
- Lead the design, development, and adoption of tools, frameworks, and capabilities to enhance developer productivity, satisfaction and deployment velocity.
- Help steer our GenAI strategy for software engineering by identifying high-impact use cases and delivering prototypes and tooling in collaboration with cross-functional teams.
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Common Engineering Applications
- Manage a small team supporting the development of core internal platforms including our data platform, time tracking solution, and APM platform.
- Provide architectural oversight and hands-on support to the teams that build and maintain these platforms.
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Change Agent and Influencer
- Cultivate a strong engineering culture around automation, observability, and secure-by-default practices.
- Coach and influence engineering leaders globally to adopt modern delivery practices and converge on shared platform investments.
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Team and Talent Leadership
- Lead a small but high-leverage team of lead architects and developers.
- Act as a multiplier by empowering others and creating scalable frameworks for shared success.
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Cross-Organizational Collaboration
- Work with divisional architects, Quality Engineering CoE, Security, Operations and Site Reliability teams to ensure alignment and synergy across initiatives.
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Thought Leadership
- Represent the organization in strategic forums, architecture boards, and industry-facing conversations.
Required Qualifications
- 8 years experience leading software delivery transformation or platform engineering initiatives in large, distributed, and matrixed organizations.
- 3 Years leadership experience
- Strong architectural expertise in cloud-native design, DevSecOps pipelines, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and observability tooling.
- Demonstrated success in influencing and leading through change across diverse stakeholder groups.
- Solid understanding of secure software development practices and regulatory considerations.
- Experience with multiple development languages and environments.
- Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.
- Willingness and ability to travel internationally.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience introducing GenAI tooling into software development environments.
- Familiarity with platform engineering approaches and internal developer portals (e.g., Backstage).
- Exposure to legacy modernization strategies, including containerization and monolith decomposition.
- Experience working in regulated environments or across business units with varying maturity levels.
- Prior experience in co-leading Centers of Excellence or enterprise-wide transformation initiatives.
- A background in building or scaling internal developer platforms, engineering enablement functions, or SRE capabilities.
- Experience working across both cloud (AWS, Azure) and on-premise environments.
Applicants may be required to appear onsite at a Wolters Kluwer office as part of the recruitment process.