Principal Architect

We seek an experienced, capable Principal Architect who has led architecture initiatives in or around e-commerce or Retail. With excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, ideally formally trained in either TOGAF or Zachman frameworks. Coming from an advanced technology and software development background, the Principal Architect will work with engineering, product, and the wider architecture team to ensure ESW strategy and industry best practices are at the heart of our design thinking.

We have a mixed approach to delivery, pulling on our agile start-up roots whilst implementing SAFe to align between traditional roles, delivery, and agile principles. The role will ensure that architecture processes are adhered too and work closely aligned to the existing ESW delivery processes, being involved in relevant retros to improve these continually. Reporting to the Director of Architecture, the role will assist in making key architecture decisions that will influence the company's direction and act as a role model and mentor to our partners in engineering and product. The right leader will positively influence stakeholders by demonstrating professionalism, enthusiasm, strong communication and creating collaborative environments for architecture to thrive.

While frequent travel is not expected, there will be required visits to our client sites in the US, Europe and Worldwide.
- Working closely with peers in product to help define roadmaps that align business strategy to technology strategy whilst balancing client needs to timelines.
- Creating high-level designs that clearly articulate strategy and technology steer. Focusing on business requirements/capabilities, data architecture, standards, impact assessments across domains, business cases, high-level implementation plans and NFRs.
- Collaborating with engineering peers to ensure that HLDs are understood, helping shape significant solution designs whilst identifying key architecture decisions and calling out technical and architectural debt.
- Working closely with agile delivery in our SAFe environment
- Being able to become an expert in one or more domains but constantly aware and working to align across domains to an enterprise view.
- Ensure the right guardrails (principles, policies, standards and NFRs) are continually updated, understood, and implemented across ESW.
- Be a positive mentor to the wider technology and product teams.
- Create and maintain the conceptual data models, as-is and to-be architectures for domains and/or strategic initiatives.

**Key Experience & Skills**:

- Kafka (ideally Confluence) for event-driven architecture and event-streaming.
- Architectural experience in native and non-native cloud services for either Azure or AWS, including Kubernetes, Cosmos DB.
- Experience using one or more: Azure DW, RedShift, Snowflake, GCP, SQL Server.
- Understanding and being able to present differences between conceptual, logical, and physical architectures to a range of stakeholders, from Engineering Managers to Execs.
- Intellectual curiosity, learning agility, and enthusiasm for tackling challenging problems.
- Outstanding communication skills are required - primarily the ability to communicate ideas.
- Deep Problem solving - the ability to analyse a business or technical issue and select the most appropriate solutions.
- Understanding of risk in designs and mitigation strategies.
- Experience in the retail industry would be a significant advantage.

**What we offer**:

- Competitive salary and a career path adapted to each person's abilities and experience within a company that is growing continuously.
- 2 days a week working from home.
- A flexible schedule and total conciliation between work and family life including reduced timetable during one month in summer.
- Become part of a multi-cultural company where you can contribute with your experience and learn from the experience of others.
- Work with amazing brands.
- Get the opportunity to influence the future of our services and platform.
- Excellent working environment with frequent social activities (hackathons, Spartan races, quarterly whole-team social event).
- Central Madrid office located an 8-minute walk from Atocha train station, with a bus stop and BiciMad station right outside the office.
- Kitchen and dining facilities as well as a fully stocked games room with games consoles etc. - great to disconnect from work for a while and have fun with your colleagues.
- Discounted parking space in the office building if you’re coming by car, bicycle parking for those worried about their carbon footprint.
- Access to private sales by some of the exclusive brands we work with.
- Enrollment in English, French, and Spanish lessons that take place during working hours.
- Mental Health Wellbeing Program.

**About us**:
ESW is the leading global and domestic direct-to-consumer (DTC) ecommerce company, empowering the world's best-loved brands to create safer, simpler and fast