Lead Pega Systems Architect

Summary of Position

• The Lead Systems Architect (LSA) is the senior technical authority responsible for designing, integrating, and scaling Pega Customer Decision Hub (CDH) solutions within a client's enterprise ecosystem. The LSA specializes in backend system integrations; ensuring real-time, reliable, secure, and high-volume data exchange between CDH and customer platforms such as CRM, MDM, billing, data lakes, marketing clouds, event hubs, and channel systems.

• This role provides architectural leadership, establishes integration standards, and ensures the technical integrity and performance of all CDH-related services.

Key Responsibilities

Enterprise Architecture & Integration Design

• Architect end-to-end integration patterns between Pega CDH and enterprise systems using REST/JSON, SOAP, Kafka, MQ, SFTP, and ETL pipelines

• Define high-level and detailed architecture blueprints, including data flow diagrams, sequence diagrams, integration specifications, and deployment architectures

• Ensure integrations support real-time decisioning, high throughput, low latency, and high availability across all customer touchpoints

• Select and enforce standards for authentication, authorization, encryption, error handling, retries, logging, and API versioning

Technical Leadership & Delivery Oversight

• Serve as the technical lead for integration workstreams across all environments (Dev → Prod)

• Review and approve all system integration designs, mappings, and interface specifications

• Guide developers and architects in building scalable and reusable components

• Ensure delivered integrations align with enterprise security, compliance, and architectural governance

CDH Enablement & Ecosystem Orchestration

• Design data sourcing strategies for interaction history, customer profile feeds, decisioning data, and AI model inputs

• Collaborate with Decisioning Architects and Data Architects to ensure integrations enable real-time eligibility, suitability, arbitration, and propensity scoring

• Optimize container behavior for inbound channels including web, mobile, contact center, ATM/kiosk, and IVR

Client Engagement & Advisory

• Lead workshops with IT, enterprise architects, and application owners to define integration requirements

• Present architectural recommendations, integration patterns, and trade-offs to executive and technical stakeholders

• Troubleshoot complex integration issues, identify root causes, and drive long-term resolutions

Quality, Performance & Governance

• Define non-functional requirements (NFRs) including performance benchmarks, throughput thresholds, and resiliency SLAs

• Oversee performance testing, failover validation, environment readiness, and capacity planning

• Ensure solutions adhere to SDLC best practices and are built for maintainability and scale

Required Experience & Skills

• 8+ years of architecture experience in enterprise systems, customer platforms, or integration engineering

• 5+ years in Pega Platform or Pega CDH delivery, preferably in an LSA or senior integration role

• Deep expertise in RESTful service design, event-based architectures, and API/microservices frameworks

• Strong understanding of relational/NoSQL databases, real-time streaming (Kafka, Kinesis), and middleware

• Proficiency with security standards, high-availability patterns, and cloud-native architectures

• Ability to translate business requirements into robust, scalable integration solutions

• Excellent communication skills for technical and executive audiences

Preferred / Certifications

Certified Pega Lead System Architect (CLSA) required

• Experience with enterprise marketing technology, CDPs, CRMs, and data hub architectures

• Cloud certifications (AWS, Azure, or GCP) are a plus