Enterprise Architect - Digital & Commerce Transformation

About the Role

GES needs an eCommerce Architect who can bring order, speed, and architectural discipline to a high-visibility global transformation already in motion. The GES Store program spans commerce, content, integrations, payments, tax, reporting, regional rollout, vendor execution, and operational stabilization. The priority is not more analysis. The priority is better decisions, clearer ownership, and architecture that can scale.

This role is expected to lead from the front. The Architect will challenge assumptions, expose weak designs, force tradeoffs into the open, and drive decisions to closure. This is not a system implementation role and it is not passive advisory. It requires a senior leader who can work through ambiguity, make practical calls, and align business, IT, PMO, engineering, vendors, and platform partners around one executable architecture.

The Architect owns architecture governance and decision quality. That means approving or rejecting designs, escalating unresolved tradeoffs, clarifying ownership, and preventing short-term delivery pressure from creating long-term platform debt. The right candidate will be comfortable making decisions with imperfect information, documenting the rationale, and holding teams accountable for the path forward.

This role will eventually transform into an overall Enterprise Architect for the entire GES IT landscape heading the Architecture Review Board (ARB).

Program Scope (Indicative)

• Replace and modernize legacy commerce capabilities with a scalable global eCommerce platform.
• Support multi-region rollout across the United States, Canada, UK, EMEA, and future markets.
• Enterprise integrations across ERP, CRM, payments, tax, reporting, search, content, identity, and operational systems.
• Stabilize live capabilities while addressing root architectural issues and technical debt.
• Architectural remediation across commerce, front-end, content, data, integration, and support models.
• Governance across internal technology teams, business stakeholders, implementation vendors, platform partners, and PMO leadership.

What Good Looks Like

• Ambiguity is reduced fast. Decisions are framed, owned, made, and documented.
• Architecture ownership is explicit across platforms, integrations, data, vendors, and workstreams.
• Decision velocity improves without bypassing governance or hiding risk.
• Business, IT, PMO, and vendors operate from one target architecture and one set of rules.
• Delivery teams execute against practical designs that scale beyond the first release.

Key Responsibilities

Decision Authority (Empowered To)

• Approve, reject, or send back architecture designs, integration patterns, data flows, platform configuration choices, and technical guardrails.
• Stop or escalate work that conflicts with the approved architecture, creates avoidable debt, or introduces unmanaged risk.
• Force decision clarity when teams are working from conflicting assumptions.
• Escalate unresolved tradeoffs to IT and Business sponsors with options, recommendation, impact, and required decision date.
• Challenge designs, sequencing, estimates, and delivery assumptions when they do not support the program outcome.

Architecture & Strategy

• Own the end-to-end platform architecture across commerce, front end, content, integrations, identity, payments, tax, reporting, and operational support.
• Define the target-state architecture and the roadmap to move from current constraints to scalable global capability.
• Identify architectural gaps, root causes, dependencies, and remediation priorities.
• Convert technical tradeoffs into sponsor-level decisions with clear consequences.
• Protect long-term platform health while keeping near-term delivery moving.

Integration & Data Architecture

• Define standard integration patterns across ERP, CRM, commerce, payments, tax, content, reporting, and internal operational systems.
• Replace brittle point-to-point thinking with reusable, governed integration patterns where they make sense.
• Clarify data ownership, system of record, synchronization rules, failure handling, retry logic, and reconciliation expectations.
• Ensure integration designs are scalable, observable, secure, and supportable across regions.
• Align data, integration, application, and infrastructure teams around designs that can actually be built and supported.

Architecture Governance & Standards

• Stand up and run the program Architecture Review Board with enough structure to control risk and enough speed to support delivery.
• Define the required standards, artifacts, decision logs, review cadence, and approval criteria.
• Maintain architecture decision records that document options considered, recommendation, approval, rationale, and downstream impact.
• Use governance to enable delivery, not create process drag.
• Surface tradeoffs early, prevent rework, and keep workstreams aligned to the approved direction.

Vendor & Partner Alignment

• Ensure vendors, platform partners, and internal teams design against one architecture, not competing versions of the truth.
• Challenge vendor designs that are not scalable, supportable, or aligned to the target state.
• Hold partners accountable for technical outcomes, not activity, staffing, or deliverable volume.
• Resolve cross-vendor design conflicts before they become delivery blockers.
• Escalate commercial, ownership, or accountability issues when they block architecture decisions.

Delivery Alignment

• Ensure architecture shows up in the build, test, release, and support model.
• Work with PMO, engineering, QA, integration, infrastructure, business, and vendors to turn architecture into executable plans.
• Identify architectural dependencies, sequencing constraints, and decision points that affect delivery milestones.
• Support issue triage and root cause analysis where defects, instability, or rework indicate deeper architectural problems.
• Give teams clear direction so they move faster with fewer assumptions, fewer debates, and less rework.

Execution Expectations

• Make decisions fast enough for an in-flight transformation and disciplined enough to control risk.
• Bring clarity when teams are stuck in debate, unclear ownership, or competing assumptions.
• Enable delivery with usable direction, not abstract architecture theory.
• Favor practical, scalable solutions over over-engineered designs that slow the program down.
• Escalate early when a decision requires sponsor alignment, funding impact, scope tradeoff, or cross-workstream prioritization.
• Document decisions so teams can execute without reopening the same debate.

Required Qualifications

• Senior architecture leadership experience on enterprise digital, commerce, platform, or integration transformation programs.
• Proven ability to shape eCommerce ecosystems across commerce platform, front end, content, payments, tax, order flow, reporting, and downstream operations.
• Strong integration architecture experience across ERP, CRM, middleware, APIs, events, batch processing, data synchronization, and exception handling.
• Experience establishing architecture governance, decision logs, standards, and design review discipline in complex delivery environments.
• Experience operating in multi-vendor, multi-workstream programs where ownership and design authority must be actively enforced.
• Ability to communicate architecture decisions clearly to executives, sponsors, PMO, engineers, vendors, and operational leaders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with BigCommerce or similar enterprise commerce platforms such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce, CommerceTools, Shopify Plus, or SAP Commerce.
• Experience with B2B commerce, account structures, price lists, catalogs, promotions, customer groups, checkout complexity, and operational workflows.
• Experience supporting multi-region or global commerce rollouts with localization, currency, tax, language, payments, and regional operating differences.
• Experience with headless or composable commerce ecosystems, including front-end frameworks, CMS, search, personalization, and content operations.
• Experience with Azure-based integration patterns, API management, serverless orchestration, monitoring, and DevOps-enabled delivery.

Critical Traits

• Strong point of view: Brings recommendations and the rationale behind them.
• Comfortable saying no: Stops weak designs, risky shortcuts, and decisions that create avoidable debt.
• Executive presence: Explains architecture choices in business terms and drives sponsor-level decisions.
• Operates in ambiguity: Moves the work forward without perfect information or full consensus.
• Accountability mindset: Owns architectural outcomes through implementation, not just design approval.
• Pragmatic judgment: Knows when to standardize, when to compromise, and when to escalate.

Work Environment:

Our team members are our family, so we help our team members care for their families. The rewards of joining GES are extensive. We offer a comprehensive benefits package to all full-time employees. Here are some of the highlights:

• Competitive salaries
• 401K with company match
• Healthcare/vision/dental insurance
• Wellness benefits
• Career development program
• Employee assistance program
• Vacation time
• Community involvement opportunities
• Team activities

And much more...