VP, Chief Architect

Key Responsibilities

• Own the cross-enterprise architectural view — current-state baseline, capability-to-system mapping, and a multi-year target-state architecture spanning commerce, store, supply chain, customer care, corporate, and data/AI.
• Define the enterprise technical roadmap with domain and platform leaders, and keep it continuously tested against business strategy.
• Lead harmonization of Signet's multi-brand technology estate, collapsing duplicative platforms and replacing brand-by-brand sprawl with shared foundations.
• Drive architectural integration of Blue Nile and future acquisitions into the unified platform without eroding brand distinctiveness.
• Make simplification measurable — track reduction of redundant systems and technical debt.
• Establish enterprise architecture standards, reference patterns, and lightweight decision governance (ADRs, decision gates).
• Serve as architectural arbiter for the CDTO on cross-cutting decisions and as primary liaison to the Enterprise Architecture team.
• Review significant programs at inception and key gates; catch misalignment early and steer initiatives back to their true business intent.
• Provide hands-on architectural leadership on a select few highest-impact, cross-domain initiatives (e.g., commerce platform modernization, CMS, order management, customer data).
• Drive the shift to an AI-assisted, agentic development model with integrated, end-to-end SDLC capability.
• Architect patterns that make agentic and AI-native systems safe and scalable (orchestration, MCP-based integration, guardrails).
• Build a small, skilled internal team, reducing reliance on external contractors over time.
• Provide peer-level leadership to domain-embedded architects; run the enterprise Architecture Community of Practice and mentor across the organization.
• Anchor every decision in customer/brand outcomes and clear economics (TCO, capex/opex, vendor terms).

Qualifications

• 15+ years of progressive technology experience, including time as Chief/Principal Architect, VP of Engineering, or CTO within a multi-brand, large-scale retail or e-commerce enterprise ($2B+ revenue).
• Practitioner architect — majority of career spent designing and shipping production systems alongside engineering teams, not strategy-only.
• Demonstrated cross-portfolio architecture ownership, ideally across distinct consumer brands sharing common infrastructure.
• Track record of platform consolidation, brand harmonization, and simplification at scale.
• Deep command of cloud, integration, event-driven, and headless/composable (MACH) architecture; hands-on fluency with a major cloud's serverless ecosystem (e.g., AWS).
• Track record authoring durable architecture artifacts (capability maps, C4 diagrams, ADRs) that teams actually use.
• Strong financial fluency and proven influence in a matrixed environment without reporting authority.
• Experience with AI-assisted SDLC practices and agentic AI architecture patterns.
• Bachelor's in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field; technical Master's preferred.
• Specialty retail or jewelry experience.
• SAP Commerce Cloud, IBM Sterling/Fluent/Manhattan OMS, headless CMS (AEM, Contentful, Contentstack), or Oracle Xstore at production scale.
• Real-time CDP (Adobe, Amperity, Salesforce) and/or Salesforce Sales/Service Cloud in retail contexts.
• Experience with permissioned distributed ledgers or heavy external APIs without adding latency.
• Multi-national e-commerce or omnichannel operations; familiarity with TOGAF, C4, or ArchiMate.