Missions Architect

About the role

The Partnership is the UK’s most successful omni-channel retailer which includes two of the UKs most loved department store and grocery brands with annual sales revenues in excess of £12B.

Architecture and Engineering are responsible for technical strategies across the value streams of our business. For our trading brands these value streams include eCommerce, Shops, Supply Chain and Customer.

The Architecture and Engineering leads in the value streams are responsible for helping to solve large complex business problems with consistent and effective architecture and engineering approaches. Change is led across a mixed technology estate (ranging from mainframe to microservices) with various resourcing models.

Our Architects work collaboratively and share knowledge, and learning is extremely important to us. We support our Architects to continuously improve their skills and keep abreast of the latest techniques and technologies.

Architects work collaboratively with peers from Business, Product, Delivery, and Engineering.

John Lewis are recruiting for a Missions Enterprise Architect to lead on complex Missions that drive business and technology outcomes across multiple John Lewis value streams. This role will report into the Head of John Lewis Architecture and Engineering

• Contract type - This position is a permanent contract.

• Flexible Working: This is a hybrid working role, therefore your time will primarily be split between working from home (in the UK) and London Head Office. However, there will also be an expectation to visit other locations as the need arises.

• This role is expected to visit the office up to twice a week, though occasionally business needs may require more frequent attendance. Our offices are open five days a week for those who prefer to work from the office more regularly.

Key Responsibilities:

•  The Mission Architect serves as the single, accountable Enterprise Architect for a critical business Mission, translating commercial strategy into a resilient, flow-optimised technology roadmap. Your primary function is to provide the architectural strategy required to support a complex, cross value stream business outcome, ensuring technology design directly drives customer and commercial value.

• You will help to understand the business problem space and define the domain boundaries to help define an adaptive architecture to enable the business to pivot where required. This includes advising on technology investments for large, often disruptive, incremental change to validate that expected benefits outweigh costs and align to business strategies - to do this you must work collaboratively with technical and non-technical stakeholders in each of the affected value streams.

• You are the designer of the socio-technical system for the Mission. While Principal Engineers drive engineering execution, you define and evolve domain boundaries to ensure the architecture minimises organizational friction and enables fast flow and high team autonomy. You will work directly with the Principle Engineer, especially within legacy environments, to maximize the discoverability and testability of services, ensuring all technology choices inherently support modern CI/CD practices and operational stability

• Partnering with Product and Business stakeholders, you must deeply understand the problem space and user needs. You translate these requirements by mapping business capability to technical architecture, acting as the credible bridge between strategy and execution. Your oversight ensures solutions maximize product value and efficiency, explicitly balancing the in-year benefit of MVPs with the multi-year necessity of realizing strategic capabilities.

• To do this you will collaborate closely with key stakeholders such as Product Leads, Delivery and Operations Managers, Infrastructure Leads as well as working closely with other Enterprise Architects, Solution Architects and Principal Engineers. 

Essential skills/experience you’ll need:

• Systems Thinking Mastery & Engineering Flow:  Proven, real-world experience in applying and evolving techniques such as Domain-Driven Design (DDD), Mapping, and Team Topologies to strategically define and evolve organizational and system boundaries. This expertise must be demonstrated through a history of using these techniques to directly increase organizational flow. Crucially, this requires a good understanding of modern software engineering practices (e.g., observability, automated testing, continuous delivery) to design architectures that are inherently operable, resilient and maintainable.

• Transformation Track Record: Extensive experience in a senior architecture role tackling ambiguous, cross-cutting "Mission" type work that involves modernising or encapsulating legacy systems. Experience must cover working across a wide range of solutions and change approaches appropriate for the business area/outcome

• Business Architecture Linkage: Demonstrated ability to map business capability requirements to technical architecture, ensuring all architectural decisions translate into tangible improvements in customer and commercial value

• IT Lifecycle Acumen: Experience of working across the entire IT lifecycle with the ability to balance long-term strategic outcomes with short-term commercial drivers and available levers in uncertain environments.

• Proven ability to leverage internal and external networks to gain insight into customer requirements, market conditions, and technology trends, feeding these into strategic thinking.

• Experience of influencing a diverse set of stakeholders at Senior Leadership levels on a major transformation or in an area with a high level of change. You must have the ability to act as a trusted advisor to senior leaders and influencing multi-million pound technology investments

• Experience of the technical implementation of package solutions into large complex environments with a mix of modern and heritage technology.

• Knowledge/experience of working with different architectural styles (e.g. monolith, service based, microservices) and integration patterns when working with different platforms (broker models, RESTful, streams, event based).

Desirable skills/experience you may have

• Retail experience

• Software engineering experience

Next Steps

• The application form consists of a CV upload followed by application questions. Please ensure you refresh the page each time you complete a task to ensure you complete everything that you need to do before the closing date.

• If you are successful following your initial application, the next stages are: a screening interview followed by a formal interview and up to 2 informal interviews. 

• You'll be asked about any adjustments you might need to support the recruitment process. Let us know, and we'll be sure to discuss it with you.

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The Partnership

We’re the largest employee owned business in the UK and home of our cherished brands, John Lewis and Waitrose. We’re not just employees, we’re Partners, driven by our purpose to build a happier world. As we look to our future, there’s never been a more exciting time to join us.  

We’re ruthlessly focused on being brilliant at retail. We continue to innovate, adapt and diversify. Never Knowingly Undersold on price, quality and service in John Lewis and passionately serving food-lovers in Waitrose.   

As Partners we all share the responsibility of ownership and in its rewards. We use our voices to contribute to our success, working together through the good and challenging times, holding true to our behaviours and treating everyone with kindness and respect. 

We all own making the Partnership somewhere we belong. Embracing our differences and creating an environment where we’re free to be ourselves and can THRIVE. Growing ourselves individually, and as a collective. 

As Partners, we make all the difference. And, we all own it.  

Important points to note:  

It’s important to note that some of our roles are subject to pre-employment vetting (which may include DBS checks for successful candidates). If required, you’ll be informed and provided with information about vetting during the recruitment process and we encourage you to complete any vetting documents quickly to avoid delays. Any DBS checks required will be carried out by a third-party registered body and financial probity checks may also be required for some of our roles.  

We occasionally close vacancies early in the event we receive a high volume of applications, and therefore, we recommend you apply early. If you require a reasonable adjustment due to a disability which means you may need longer to complete your application please contact us as soon as possible.

We want all of our Partners to have a good work-life balance and we support flexible working. This might mean flexible or compressed hours, job sharing or shorter hour contracts, where possible. Please discuss this further with the hiring manager during your interview.