Lead Enterprise Architect

About the role

The Enterprise Architecture Lead is a senior technical leader within Merkle’s Digital Product Engineering (DPE) practice, part of the broader Digital Experience (DX) organization. DPE serves as Merkle’s rapid innovation engine and cross-capability orchestrator, delivering bespoke product development, composable modernization, and AI-powered solutions for Fortune 100 clients. This role combines deep enterprise architecture expertise with a product engineering mindset.

Responsibilities

• Owning the end-to-end technical architecture across the engagement, ensuring all solution components align to the approved roadmap, adhere to enterprise standards, and are delivered with the quality and rigor expected of a world-class digital product engineering organization.
• Designing and governing integrated, enterprise-class solutions anchored in the Adobe ecosystem (AEM, AEP, Target, Analytics, Workfront) while orchestrating adjacent platforms (Salesforce Clouds, middleware, data infrastructure, and enterprise integration layers) into a unified, cohesive architecture.
• Leading the initial phase of work focused on uplifting the client’s most critical digital properties, using Adobe Experience Manager as the foundational platform while ensuring the architecture is composable enough to support future modernization and AI-powered enhancement.
• Designing scalable integration patterns across platforms, APIs, data layers, and middleware to ensure seamless data flow, system interoperability, and operational resilience across a complex, global technology estate.
• Bringing the operational rigor and delivery methodology of a world-class product engineering engagement: sprint-level architecture involvement, technical debt management, dependency mapping, risk mitigation, and hands-on leadership that keeps large, multi-team programs on track.
• Leading and mentoring multi-disciplinary delivery teams (developers, platform specialists, data engineers, QA) across workstreams, ensuring technical alignment, quality standards, and consistent architectural decision-making.
• Serving as a senior technical authority with client stakeholders at the VP and C-suite level, translating complex architectural decisions into business-relevant language and building confidence in the delivery approach.
• Presenting a coherent technical narrative that connects platform stability with innovation velocity.
• Identifying and incorporating emerging capabilities (AI-powered personalization, intelligent automation, agentic workflows) into the delivery roadmap where they add measurable value, not as theoretical exercises, but as production-ready enhancements integrated within the existing architecture.
• Collaborating with Merkle’s adjacent practices (Content Technology, Commerce, Experience Design, Analytics) to compose solutions where DPE provides the product engineering spine. Ensuring solution designs leverage cross-practice expertise while maintaining DPE’s architectural standards and delivery accountability.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college/university; Master’s degree or relevant certifications (Adobe Certified Expert/Master, Salesforce certifications, TOGAF, AWS/GCP) strongly preferred
• 15+ years of hands-on enterprise architecture and solution delivery experience, with a significant portion spent in large-scale SI or digital product engineering environments (e.g., Accenture, Deloitte Digital, Thoughtworks, or equivalent product-minded organizations)
• Broad multi-platform fluency: Working delivery experience with adjacent enterprise platforms including Salesforce (Marketing Cloud, Data Cloud, Service Cloud), middleware/integration platforms (MuleSoft, Informatica, or equivalent), cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP), and data platforms (Snowflake or similar).
• A proven track record of delivering large, complex, multi-year, global SI or product engineering engagements ($10M+ scope) from architecture through go-live, including governance of multi-team, multi-vendor delivery models
• Ability to operate at the C-suite level with poise and credibility, translating technical architecture into business outcomes and building long-term trusted advisor relationships
• Strong delivery methodology experience - fluent in Agile at scale (SAFe, Scrum of Scrums), waterfall-hybrid models, and the practical realities of governing large programs
• Product engineering mindset: Ability to think beyond governance and into roadmap ownership, backlog strategy, and framing technical debt as a product decision rather than solely a risk register item
• Hands-on leadership style - this role requires someone who can whiteboard an architecture and present to a CTO in the same week
• Excellent organizational, communication, and presentation skills with exceptional attention to detail
• Experience working within or alongside digital agency, CXM, or product engineering environments is a strong plus

Benefits

• Medical, vision, and dental insurance
• Life insurance
• Short-term and long-term disability insurance
• 401(k)
• Flexible paid time off
• At least 15 paid holidays per year
• Paid sick and safe leave
• Paid parental leave