Technical Architect - Relex

About us: 

Passion for food. Hunger for tech. We make METRO digital. 

Today technology is driving the world. And at METRO.digital we are driving the technology for one of the leading international wholesalers specializing in food - METRO. From e-commerce to checkout, to delivery software, we work on a wide range of products to make each day a success for our customers and colleagues. With passion and ownership, we build the future of wholesale.  

You are driving to create smart solutions for customers around the globe? You want to grow in a flexible environment? Let the right career opportunity find you and join us! 

Key Responsibilities

Core Responsibilities (Mandatory)

• Own and evolve the technical architecture for the Ultra Fresh product team implementing RELEX SaaS for demand forecasting and replenishment.
• Act as design authority for the METRO–RELEX integration landscape, ensuring that architecture decisions are scalable, maintainable, secure, and aligned with METRO standards.
• Define and maintain the technical architecture of blueprint, interface specifications, integration patterns, data flow design, and operational runbook for the solution.
• Lead the design of inbound and outbound integrations between METRO systems and RELEX, including batch/file-based flows, APIs, data transformations, monitoring, and error-handling mechanisms.
• Govern the implementation of master data, transactional data, historical data loading, order proposal flows, forecasting outputs, and replenishment-related interfaces.
• Collaborate closely with Product Owners, Business Consultants, Solution Consultants, Engineering teams, Accenture, RELEX, and METRO platform owners to translate business needs into robust technical solutions.
• Provide architectural guidance to implementation engineers, ensuring consistent engineering practices across APIs, data pipelines, cloud services, observability, deployment, and incident handling.
• Review solution designs, technical specifications, code quality, integration approaches, and deployment of readiness before major releases or go-live milestones.
• Drive technical risk identification, mitigation planning, and decision-making for topics such as data quality, interface stability, performance, security, operational monitoring, and SaaS limitations.
• Support SIT, UAT, cutover, go-live, hypercare, and stabilization activities from a technical readiness and architecture perspective.
• Lead root-cause analysis for complex or recurring technical issues involving integrations, RELEX Connect, data processing, batch runs, monitoring, or dependencies with other METRO systems.
• Ensure proper technical documentation, knowledge transfer, and handover to Application Managed Services or continuous service teams.

Additional Responsibilities (Preferred)

• Define the target operating model for technical ownership together with Product, Platform, Support, and external partners.
• Support vendor and partner governance by coordinating technical escalations with RELEX and Accenture.
• Contribute to roadmap planning by identifying architectural improvements, technical debt, automation opportunities, and scalability needs.
• Establish integration monitoring, alerting, runbook, and service reporting standards for operational support.
• Guide the team on secure access management, role design, environment readiness, and compliance requirements.
• Support release governance, regression testing strategy, and version upgrade readiness for the RELEX SaaS landscape.
• Mentor engineers and help grow internal capability around RELEX integrations, SaaS operations, data flows, and cloud-based engineering practices.

Required Technical Competencies

Mandatory

• Strong experience as Solution Architect, Technical Architect, Integration Architect, or Senior Engineer in enterprise-scale implementation projects.
• Solid understanding of SaaS implementation models, vendor-managed platforms, shared responsibility models, and integration constraints.
• Strong knowledge of integration architecture, including REST APIs, batch processing, file-based integrations, event-driven patterns, data transformation, and interface monitoring.
• Experience designing and operating integrations between enterprise systems and external SaaS platforms.
• Good understanding of data architecture concepts, including master data, transactional data, historical data loading, data quality, data validation, and reconciliation.
• Experience with Java, SQL, PL/SQL, Spring Boot, Swagger/OpenAPI, and RESTful APIs.
• Experience with databases and data platforms such as PostgreSQL, Oracle, Cloud SQL, and BigQuery.
• Experience with cloud, DevOps, and observability tooling such as Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Docker, GitHub, GitHub Actions, SonarQube, and DataDog.
• Experience with messaging and integration technologies such as Kafka, Pub/Sub, Azure Blob Storage, or comparable enterprise integration platforms.
• Ability to define technical documentation, architecture diagrams, interface specifications, operational runbooks, and integration test strategies.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis skills.
• Ability to influence technical decisions across multiple teams, vendors, and stakeholders without relying only on formal authority.
• Excellent communication skills in English, both written and verbal, with the ability to explain complex technical topics to business and leadership stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with RELEX, retail forecasting, replenishment, supply chain planning, or similar enterprise planning platforms.
• Experience with RELEX Connect, SaaS integration layers, batch runs, nightly/weekly runs, monitoring, and operational data handling.
• Experience with Azure Blob Storage, Azure integration services, or hybrid Azure/GCP integration landscapes.
• Experience working with external vendors or implementation partners in large-scale rollout programs.
• Experience supporting pilot-to-rollout transitions, multi-country deployments, hypercare, and stabilization phases.
• Experience defining support models across L1, L2, L3, vendor support, and internal product teams.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated deployment processes, environment management, and release governance.
• Understanding of security, access management, SSO, role mapping, auditability, and compliance requirements in SaaS implementations.
• Strong leadership mindset with the ability to mentor engineers, challenge designs constructively, and keep technical delivery aligned with business outcomes.

Role Context

The Ultra Fresh team is implementing RELEX SaaS as the planning platform for ultra-fresh demand forecasting and replenishment. The solution integrates METRO systems with RELEX using a mix of enterprise interfaces, data pipelines, file-based transfers, cloud services, monitoring, and operational support processes.

The Architect will replace the architectural ownership previously covered by Alexandru Modoran and will act as the main technical authority within the Ultra Fresh engineering team. The role is expected to provide hands-on architectural leadership, support implementation engineers, align technical decisions with METRO platform standards, and ensure the solution can move from pilot delivery into scalable rollout and stable run-mode operations.