Technical Architect

Technical Architect - Composable Commerce

6-Month Initial Contract | £800/day max | Inside IR35
Remote

We're looking for a highly experienced, hands-on Technical Architect to provide technical leadership for a strategic composable eCommerce platform supporting a major retail and optical client.

The role combines architecture, engineering leadership and production support, with a strong focus on commerce tools, MACH architecture, TypeScript/Node.js and Microsoft Azure. You'll play a key role in transitioning technical ownership from an incumbent supplier while driving platform reliability, continuous improvement and engineering best practice.

The Role

You'll be responsible for:

• Providing senior technical leadership across production support, incidents, defects, changes and enhancements
• Acting as the senior escalation point for complex technical issues and major incidents
• Leading root cause analysis and driving permanent, high-quality fixes
• Reviewing architecture, technical approaches, code and pull requests
• Investigating complex production issues across applications, APIs, integrations, SaaS and Azure
• Supporting knowledge transfer and establishing independent technical ownership
• Mentoring engineers and strengthening the team's commerce, cloud and platform capabilities
• Improving CI/CD, automated testing, deployment automation, monitoring and observability
• Driving automation, platform hardening, resilience and technical debt reduction
• Working constructively with suppliers and technical teams to challenge solutions and ensure decisions are evidence-based

Essential Technical Experience

Composable Commerce / commercetools

• Proven commercial experience designing, building and supporting commercetools production solutions
• Strong understanding of commercetools APIs, configuration, data structures and integration patterns
• Experience troubleshooting complex commercetools production issues
• Strong understanding of headless, API-first and composable commerce

MACH Architecture

Strong practical experience with:

• Microservices
• API-first design
• Cloud-native SaaS
• Headless architecture
• Event-driven and distributed systems
• Integration resilience and failure handling

TypeScript / Node.js

• Strong hands-on TypeScript and Node.js development
• Ability to read, debug, review and write production-quality TypeScript
• API, integration service and serverless development
• REST API and third-party SaaS integrations
• Commercetools SDK experience highly desirable

Microsoft Azure

• Strong experience supporting cloud-native applications on Azure
• Hands-on Azure Functions, ideally using TypeScript/Node.js
• Azure App Services and serverless/PaaS architectures
• NoSQL experience, with Cosmos DB highly desirable
• Ability to troubleshoot performance, networking, configuration and integration issues

Frontend / Web Architecture

• Strong understanding of modern web and headless commerce architectures
• Working knowledge of React and Next.js
• Ability to troubleshoot issues across complete customer journeys

Retail & eCommerce Experience - Essential

You'll need significant experience delivering or supporting high-volume B2C retail/eCommerce platforms, ideally across multi-market or multi-region environments.

Experience should include customer journeys such as:

• Product discovery and search
• Basket/cart and checkout
• Customer journeys
• Promotions
• Payments
• Order management

Experience integrating commerce platforms with CMS, PIM, payment, search, promotions, customer and order management systems is highly desirable.

DevOps / SRE / Operational Engineering

Strong experience across:

• CI/CD and deployment automation
• Infrastructure and configuration as code
• Automated unit, integration and regression testing
• Monitoring, logging, tracing and observability
• Root cause analysis and problem management
• Resilience and platform hardening
• Technical debt management
• Production debugging
• Release and rollback strategies
• Automated operational runbooks
• Vulnerability remediation
• Shift-left engineering and continuous improvement

Technology Environment

The platform incorporates technologies including:

commercetools | React / Next.js | TypeScript / Node.js | Azure Functions | Azure App Services | Cosmos DB | Contentful | Algolia | Talon.One | Adyen | Cloudflare | GitHub CI/CD | Infrastructure as Code | OpenTelemetry | Splunk

Equivalent technologies may also be considered where the candidate has strong composable commerce experience.

What We're Looking For

We're looking for someone with strong technical credibility who can operate comfortably between architecture, engineering and live production support.

You should be confident challenging technical decisions constructively, diagnosing complex issues using code, logs and telemetry, remaining calm during major incidents, and balancing rapid service restoration with long-term engineering quality.

Contract Details

• Role: Technical Architect - Composable Commerce
• Duration: 6 months initially
• Rate: Up to £800 per day
• IR35: Inside IR35
• Location: Remote
• Start: September 2026

This is a hands-on Technical Architect role - not a purely strategic architecture position. The successful candidate will be expected to get into the technical detail, support production issues and actively guide engineering teams.