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# Enterprise Architect

- **Company:** C&A Retail GmbH
- **Location:** Düsseldorf, Germany
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Continuous Integration, Distributed Systems, SAP (Applications), Software Engineering, Delivery Pipeline, Snowflake, Togaf, Event Driven Architecture, Build Management, Apache Kafka, Domain Driven Design, Legacy Systems
- **Published:** August 6, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.adzuna.de/details/5830041401

## About the Role

* 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, including meaningful time in an architecture, platform, or technical-standards capacity
 * Demonstrated ownership of architecture governance or standards for at least one significant domain
 * Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, integration patterns, and cloud infrastructure
 * Ability to remain hands-on: comfortable building, prototyping, or reviewing code and infrastructure, not only producing diagrams and documents
 * Working experience with AI/ML-assisted development tooling, or strong aptitude to build for it quickly
 * Experience mentoring or informally leading engineers outside your immediate team, * Formal enterprise architecture background or certification (e.g., TOGAF or equivalent framework experience)
 * Experience with event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka) at both the standards and implementation level
 * Experience building internal developer platforms, self-service tooling, or "golden path" templates (e.g., Backstage or equivalent)
 * Experience building or operating agentic AI development pipelines, evaluation frameworks, or AI-assisted CI/CD gates
 * Exposure to data platform tooling (Fivetran, dbt, Snowflake or equivalent), SAP ecosystems, or retail/supply chain systems
 * Familiarity with Domain-Driven Design as it applies to enterprise and service boundaries

Leadership Expectations

 * An architect (sets direction, standards, and principles across a domain)
 * A builder (stays close enough to the code and infrastructure to validate what you design)
 * A trusted technical reference for both governance-level decisions and day-to-day engineering reality
 * A multiplier through standards where appropriate, and through tooling and hands-on example where standards alone aren't enough
 * A pragmatic decision-maker who balances architectural rigor with delivery speed and developer experience

## Description

* Define and maintain architecture principles, standards, and reference architectures across one or more domains (Consumer, Merchandising, Supply Chain, Data)
 * Own and evolve technology roadmaps, ensuring alignment between business strategy and technical direction
 * Establish and run architecture governance: RFCs, ADRs, design reviews, and architecture review boards
 * Assess and steer major technology and vendor decisions, including build-vs-buy trade-offs
 * Maintain the enterprise architecture landscape (application, data, integration, and technology views) and keep it current and legible to stakeholders
 * Ensure architectural decisions meet enterprise-wide non-functional requirements: security, compliance, scalability, cost, and interoperability
 * Act as a bridge between business stakeholders, product leadership, and engineering teams, translating strategy into actionable technical direction
 * Coach engineering teams on architectural principles and standards, and review designs for conformance
 * Stay hands-on: validate architectural decisions by building, prototyping, or directly contributing to the platform and tooling that support them, rather than governing at the diagram level alone
 * Design and build the paved paths, templates, and self-service tooling that let product teams ship reliably against the standards you define
 * Build and evolve the tooling and guardrails for AI-assisted and agentic development (agent workflows, tool integrations, evaluation harnesses, human-in-the-loop review points), and encode these practices into the architecture standards you own
 * Own the reliability, scalability, and cost profile of the platform services or reference implementations you build in support of your architecture
 * Reduce toil and cognitive load for product engineering teams by improving CI/CD, provisioning, environments, and internal documentation
 * Take ownership of ambiguous or orphaned technical areas (legacy systems, unowned integrations, unmaintained tooling) and drive them to a stable, well-documented, standards-compliant state
 * Coach and raise the platform-literacy and engineering-practice bar for teams through office hours, pairing, and clear documentation, not just standards documents


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