System Diagnostics & Optimization: Review the current "as-is" customer experience and marketing data ecosystem to identify critical bottlenecks where systems are overloaded or lagging.
Solution & Data Flow Design: Author high-level solution architecture diagrams, detailed data lineage maps (source $\rightarrow$ transformation $\rightarrow$ destination), and high-level API/interface definitions.
Tradeoff Analysis: Evaluate 2–3 technical approaches for complex integration challenges and articulate the clear pros, cons, and business implications to leadership.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Facilitate requirements discussions with marketing teams, product owners, and engineering squads, translating highly technical constraints into simple, business-friendly language.
Governance Alignment: Align all designs with established enterprise standards (including TOGAF concepts) and enforce strict compliance regarding PII handling, consent, and data privacy (GDPR/CCPA).
Qualifications & Core Competencies
Customer Domain Expertise: Deep, practical experience designing architectures for complex loyalty program structures (points, tiers, accrual/redemption), member profiles, and omni-channel marketing campaigns (segmentation, targeting, personalization).
Advanced Integration & Messaging: Mastery of integration patterns, including real-time event-driven architecture, asynchronous messaging (Kafka/MSK), and robust ETL/data pipelines (Airflow or NiFi preferred).
CDP & Data Fundamentals: Strong conceptual and practical knowledge of Customer Data Platforms (CDP), identity resolution, and core data modeling tradeoffs (normalization vs. denormalization).
Cloud Architecture: Foundational proficiency in the AWS ecosystem, specifically covering compute (EC2, containers, serverless), storage (S3, RDS, DynamoDB), and core networking/security (VPC, subnets).
T-Shaped Technical Breadth: Broad, conceptual familiarity across the full stack—including how web/mobile front-ends consume APIs, microservices vs. monolith tradeoffs, CRM platforms (Salesforce), and modern MarTech engines (Adobe, Braze).
Industry Experience (Plus): Prior architecture experience within the travel, hospitality, or aviation sectors—specifically regarding booking lifecycles (Search $\rightarrow$ Offer $\rightarrow$ Order $\rightarrow$ Fulfillment) or Passenger Service Systems (PSS)—is highly valued