Enterprise Digital & Cloud Architect

Role Summary

The Enterprise Digital & Cloud Architect translates business strategy into scalable, secure, cost-efficient, and resilient solutions across digital platforms and cloud infrastructure. This role combines expertise in digital solution architecture with deep knowledge of cloud technologies (primarily Microsoft Azure) to define patterns, standards, and governance for enterprise-wide initiatives. The architect partners with product, engineering, infrastructure, and business stakeholders to deliver measurable outcomes across customer experience, operations, and growth initiatives while optimizing cloud cost and performance.

Core Responsibilities

Architecture Design & Governance

• Translate business objectives into holistic solution architectures that span digital platforms and cloud infrastructure.
• Define and enforce architecture guardrails, design patterns, and standards for both application and cloud environments.
• Ensure alignment with enterprise architecture principles, roadmaps, and reference architectures.
• Identify and document gaps, risks, dependencies, and mitigation strategies early in the lifecycle.
• Establish governance for resource provisioning, tagging, and cost management.

Technical Leadership & Delivery

• Lead end-to-end solution design across frontend, backend, integration, data, and cloud infrastructure for the digital platform.
• Guide teams through architecture reviews, technical evaluations, and implementation choices for digital and cloud-native solutions.
• Drive adoption of cloud-native services and modern digital architecture patterns (microservices, BFF, event-driven, serverless).
• Promote engineering excellence through DevOps/SRE practices (CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, automated testing, monitoring, APM, feature flags, A/B testing).

Cloud Strategy, Cost Optimization & Standards

• Develop and maintain cost models, budgets, and optimization strategies for Azure services.
• Implement FinOps practices to monitor and control cloud spend while maximizing business value.
• Define standards for scalability, performance, and resilience in cloud deployments.
• Ensure cloud architectures support disaster recovery, high availability, and compliance requirements.
• Stakeholder Engagement & Requirements
• Partner with product owners and business stakeholders to elicit, refine, and document requirements and success criteria.
• Facilitate cross functional working sessions with designers, engineers, and business SMEs to de risk ambiguous/problematic requirements.
• Communicate complex technical concepts to non technical audiences with clarity and actionable recommendations.

Research Innovation & Continuous Improvement

• Assess emerging technologies, frameworks, and methodologies; provide strategic recommendations aligned to enterprise goals
• Bring hands-on experience in evaluating and implementing third-party SaaS solutions to accelerate digital transformation initiatives
• Maintain and enhance architecture documentation in approved repositories for transparency and reuse.
• Drive continuous improvement of architecture standards and actively contribute to the technology roadmap.

Security, Compliance & Quality

• Embed security-by-design principles, identity and access management, data privacy, and compliance requirements within all architectures.
• Ensure solutions meet availability, performance, and observability of SLAs/SLOs with appropriate metrics and dashboards.

Industry-Specific (QSR)

• Apply domain expertise across POS, Back Office Operations, Kitchen Management, Payment Processing, Order Management, and MarTech (loyalty, CRM, CDP, customer segmentation, web analytics) to architect integrated customer and store solutions.

Required Qualifications

Technical Expertise

• Architecture frameworks & practices: TOGAF (or equivalent), architecture modeling, reference architectures.
• Cloud & infrastructure: Microsoft Azure (compute, storage, networking, security), microservices, BFF patterns, event driven architecture.
• Application & integration: .NET, Node.js, React Native; REST/GraphQL API design; messaging; integration patterns.
• Data & Analytics: SQL and data validation; familiarity with AI/ML use cases and responsible AI considerations.
• Observability & Quality: APM, logging, monitoring, automated testing, performance tuning.

Business & Analytical Skills

• Proven ability to decompose complex problems, identify edge cases and negative scenarios, and recommend pragmatic solutions.
• Experience translating business strategy into clear architecture requirements and measurable outcomes.
• Strong analytical skills to identify cost drivers, optimize resource utilization, and recommend pragmatic solutions.

Collaboration & Communication

• Strong facilitation and interpersonal skills; adept at building consensus across product, engineering, design, and business teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication tailored to both technical and non technical audiences.

Tools & Platforms

• Cloud & Infrastructure: Azure, ARM Templates, Terraform
• Architecture & Modeling: LeanIX, LucidCharts/Visio, ARIS Business Process Mapping
• Delivery & Collaboration: Azure DevOps, JIRA, Confluence, GitHub
• API & Data Validation: Postman, SQL
• Monitoring & Cost Management: DataDog, App Insights, Grafana, Azure Monitor, Azure Cost Management

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with MarTech Stack (loyalty, CRM, CDP, customer segmentation, web analytics).
• Experience implementing enterprise-scale Azure landing zones and governance frameworks.
• Prior architecture leadership within QSR or multi unit retail environments.
• Knowledge of security frameworks and compliance (e.g., PCI for payments).