Enterprise Architect (m/f/d)

The future looks like you

With over 1,300 stores in 17 European countries and more than 27,000 employees, C&A is one of Europe's leading fashion retailers. Every day, C&A welcomes millions of visitors to its stores in Europe and to its online shop. C&A offers high-quality and long-lasting fashion at affordable prices for all. We are building on 184 years of experience in the fashion industry and continuously modernize the company to become an omnichannel fashion retailer.

At C&A we are driven by our values. We are united by our passion for fashion and consumers. We believe that affordable and high-quality fashion is not contradictory to caring for people & the planet. We see ourselves as an always-on learning community, always forward thinking and acting to develop our business and innovate the industry. Only when we work together as a team, we can face challenges and find innovative solutions. This is your chance to join the C&A team as an Enterprise Architect / Staff Engineer!

This role combines traditional enterprise architecture technology standards, governance, roadmaps, and business alignment with hands-on, modern engineering practice. You are expected to operate as a credible architecture authority in the classic sense (frameworks, principles, standards, governance boards) while also staying close enough to the code and infrastructure to build, validate, and evolve what you design including the platform and AI-assisted tooling that increasingly underpins how C&A builds software.

Your responsibilities

• 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

What you bring

• 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

Preferred Qualifications

• 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

What we offer

This is an opportunity for you to join us on a truly exciting transformation journey, where you’ll be able to leave footprints that last and contribute significantly to our vision. As well as knowing that you played a key part in the evolution of one of Europe’s most recognizable retail brands, you will also enjoy:

• Countless learning and development opportunities via our C&A academy
• Access to a Partner Discount Scheme
• An employee discount of 20% in C&A stores
• 30 days' vacation
• Corporate pension scheme
• Mental health and wellness program
• An exciting job in an international and inspirational working environment
• A positive working atmosphere and a talented team with an open feedback culture