Product Architect

About bol

Bol is the largest online retailer in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Position

How do you make our customers happy?

Bol.com is changing retail to make everyday life easier for 11 million Dutch and Belgian customers. We are joined on this mission by 47,000 partner sellers that delight customers with relevant propositions. Combined, we offer about 34 million products on our retail tech platform. And that number is constantly growing. It’s up to you to help keep that number growing, and to ensure our partners become even better equipped to serve our shared customers.

What you get

Working at bol.com is challenging and therefore you get something in return. Besides salary, you will also get:

• A yearly bonus
• The opportunity to work broad
• A flexible work culture
• Holiday allowance
• Holiday entitlement of 29 days
• Travel allowance
• A place where you can be 100% you
• Group insurance and more!

We warmly welcome our new colleagues, so they feel home as soon as possible. During your onboarding program, we give you all the ins and outs about bol.com! 

Your responsibilities

As Product Architect you are a (welcome) member of a large, self-steering product team in which IT and business professionals work side-by-side. You are the architecture expert on your product, and counsel colleagues on the strategic level to ensure product targets are met and the rapid pace of innovation is maintained. You sign off on an architecture that helps us realize our platform ambitions. A role with substantial impact, particularly for our 47k platform partners, as your work determines the level of success they can achieve. Now and in the future.

You are a member of the leadership team for your product and co-responsible, along with the product and engineering manager, for the success of innovations within your domain. This requires you to challenge colleagues in a positive and constructive way and keep everyone working towards shared goals. You have a strong and well-founded vision, are an attentive listener who asks the right questions, and use your strong communication skills to generate commitment to the architecture and planned innovations. Your ability to ‘connect’ is key to achieving sustainable success. One of your primary responsibilities is to create and promote a long-term vision (3-5 years). You will get help of course, because we believe in bottom-up innovation. Your vision will be the product of a collaborative process that includes scrum teams, tech leads and business analysts in your domain.

Job specs

• Create an ambitious vision on the product, together with business and IT-colleagues
• Use that vision to determine in which direction our landscape should evolve
• Build expertise and share it with your product team and the rest of the organization, become a valued discussion partner on all levels of the organization
• Connect products from a holistic view of the organization
• Collaborate intensively with IT and business teams, particularly on the strategic level
• Win the trust of key decision-makers and provide (un)solicited advice on product-related issues

Why you can make the difference

Because you are passionate about pioneering and combine a long term vision with the talent to make innovative ideas practicable. Stakeholder management and leadership skills are essential, as are powerful communication skills and the audacity to question the status quo. You strive to realize your ideas and operate from a foundation of relationships rather than authority. You are able to maintain an overview of ongoing and planned initiatives, and foresee the impact decisions will have on the application landscape. You are self-starting and sure-footed in a dynamic environment, in which hierarchy and job responsibilities can be fluid concepts. You are creative and flexible in choosing how, e.g. presentations or IT architecture designs, to best convey your message. A background in technical consultancy is not a requirement, but it would make for a good match. Analytical and conceptual skills are essential. As is genuine enthusiasm and an entrepreneurial personality. You should also be a strategic thinker with an affinity for implementing projects: the journey is just as valuable as crossing the finish line.

3 reasons why this is (not) for you

• Yes, if you bring a master’s degree, application modeling and application optimization experience to the table
• Yes, if your passions include making the complex lucid
• Yes, if enthusing and convincing people gives you energy
• No, if you think developing a vision is a solo activity; external input would only distract you
• No, if you consider a day without traditional architecture frameworks and tools (e.g. TOGAF and Archimate) a day not fully lived
• No, if you believe architects should appeal to their authority to set the direction for others

Where you’ll work

At the premier online retail tech platform in the Netherlands and Belgium. A platform where 11 million Dutch and Belgian customers can choose from over 30 million articles. A platform that helps roughly 47,000 commercial partners run their business. And a platform that will never be ‘finished’, because bol.com has been reinventing retail since 1999, and we always will be. If there’s a better way to do something, we’re working on it! Together with our customers, partners, and about 2,500 colleagues. And hopefully together with you! In this role, you’ll work together with the leadership team of product and engineering managers. All told, approximately 50 business and IT colleagues work on this product, across eight innovation teams. These teams develop and maintain their software autonomously, in accordance with the DevOps philosophy. You report to the Lead Architect of the Assortment & Selling domain and participate in bol.com’s central architecture team. Here you can share and calibrate your ideas with a large group of colleague architects.

Additional details

About bol.com

For over 13 million people in the Netherlands and Belgium, bol.com is their go-to online shop. On our platform, they can find over 34 million products. These items are not just offered by bol.com but primarily by our 47,000 partners: entrepreneurs who work together with bol.com to reach their customers. Together we aim to create the best online retail tech platform for our customers and partners, giving them a personal and inspiring experience. To achieve that goal we research, innovate, experiment and build. Every day.

To our customers, bol.com might seem just a website, an app and a parcel on their doormat. But at the scale we operate, you may already be imagining: it is much more. It’s about hundreds of different applications, each providing a clear capability. Together they form our tech retail platform. Tech impacts the whole process, from assets on the virtual shelves to items in the shopping baskets, from products in the warehouse to parcels at the front door. Altogether we run millions of lines of code in a modern microservices architecture, all created by our tech professionals. Furthermore, we do not just write code, we also experiment. We research data, and together with other disciplines we are continuously discovering ways to improve our products.