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 enoug