Solution Architect
Department: Architecture & Engineering
Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time
Location: Head Office, Chelsea House
Reporting To: Keerthi Krishnamurthy
Description
Main Purpose: Design, define, and lead architecture across corporate platforms, including Finance (reporting, audit, and controls), HR, Property, Legal, and other back-office systems, to modernise and evolve enterprise capabilities across the retail business.
Provide strategic architectural leadership across ERP, core finance, and corporate platforms, enabling the organisation to progressively evolve from legacy systems (e.g. Oracle EBS) toward modern, scalable, and integrated enterprise solutions, while ensuring resilience and stability of the existing estate in the interim.
Act as the design authority for corporate platforms, guiding incremental modernisation while shaping the long-term ERP and corporate systems transformation roadmap across the retail business.
Key Accountabilities
- Provide architectural leadership for ERP and corporate platforms, defining the target-state architecture across Finance, HR, Procurement, Property, Legal, and enterprise back-office systems.
- Own and evolve the ERP and corporate platform roadmap, driving a phased approach that delivers incremental modernisation (e.g. upgrades, automation, optimisation) while shaping longer-term transformation direction.
- Define future-state architecture leveraging modern patterns such as SaaS solutions, modular architecture, API-led integration, and event-driven design where appropriate.
- Translate business strategy, regulatory requirements, and corporate operating needs into scalable, compliant, and resilient architectures.
- Define and govern integration patterns, data flows, and technology constraints across the ERP and corporate ecosystem, including finance (reporting, audit, and controls), HR, payroll, procurement, property, and enterprise reporting systems.
- Ensure ERP and corporate platforms support accurate financial reporting, auditability, and regulatory compliance, including statutory and management reporting requirements.
- Act as the architectural authority for corporate platforms, providing direction and trade-offs to Finance, HR, Technology, and Executive leadership.
- Enable ERP and corporate platforms to support modern operating models, improved automation, and timely business insight, while maintaining strong governance and controls.
- Identify and manage architectural risk across scalability, security, compliance, resilience, and long-term maintainability.
- Uplift architecture and engineering capability through standards, reference architectures, and decision frameworks, enabling consistent and scalable delivery.
Key Responsibilities
- Corporate Platform Strategy & Architecture - Define and evolve enterprise architecture across ERP and corporate platforms, ensuring alignment with business strategy, enterprise architecture principles, and long-term operating model direction. Drive adoption of modern, modular ERP and SaaS-based corporate solutions at enterprise scale.
- Finance & Corporate Transformation - Lead architectural direction for the modernisation of Finance, HR, and back-office platforms, enabling incremental transformation of core processes including Record-to-Report, Order-to-Cash, Procure-to-Pay, Fixed Assets, and Financial Reporting. Partner with Finance and HR leadership to simplify and standardise operating models across the enterprise.
- Architecture Governance & Decision Authority - Act as design authority for corporate platforms, defining architecture standards, reference architectures, and key design decisions. Own governance across non-functional requirements including security, compliance, scalability, resilience, and regulatory controls.
- Technology Selection & Platform Rationalisation - Evaluate and guide selection of ERP and corporate platforms across Finance, HR, Procurement, Property, and Legal domains. Ensure technology choices are aligned to enterprise strategy, cost optimisation, and long-term architectural sustainability.
- Integration & Enterprise Data Architecture - Define enterprise integration patterns and data flows across corporate systems (Finance, HR, Payroll, Procurement, Property, Banking, and enterprise reporting/analytics platforms), ensuring seamless interoperability with operational and retail platforms. Enable consistent, trusted, and timely financial and workforce data for reporting and decision-making.
- Investment, Business Case & Risk Advisory - Provide architectural input into business cases and investment decisions, assessing feasibility, risk, regulatory compliance, and alignment with target architecture and roadmap.
- Stakeholder Leadership & Advisory - Act as a trusted advisor to Finance, HR, and senior technology stakeholders, influencing strategic decisions and ensuring alignment between business outcomes and architectural direction.
- Innovation & Capability Development - Monitor emerging technologies across ERP and corporate platforms, driving pragmatic innovation aligned to business value. Promote architectural excellence and continuous capability uplift across teams.
Qualifications and Experience
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a relevant discipline (e.g. Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems)
- Significant experience in Solution Architecture and enterprise engineering, with deep expertise across Finance, HR, Procurement, and corporate platforms
- Proven track record delivering large-scale ERP and finance transformation programmes
- Strong understanding of end-to-end Finance processes, including Record-to-Report, financial reporting, audit, controls, and regulatory compliance
- Experience with modern enterprise architecture patterns, including SaaS ERP, cloud-native platforms, APIs, and DevOps practices
- Demonstrated experience operating in agile, product-led delivery environments at enterprise scale
- Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders and lead architectural decision-making across complex organisations
- Experience integrating ERP platforms with broader enterprise ecosystems (HR, payroll, procurement, property, analytics, and operational systems)
Core Technical & Architectural Competencies
- Enterprise Architecture & Technology Strategy - Defines and evolves enterprise architecture across Finance and corporate platforms, ensuring alignment with business strategy, operating model transformation, and long-term technology roadmaps.
- ERP, Finance & Corporate Systems Expertise - Deep understanding of ERP ecosystems and core corporate platforms, including Finance (reporting, audit, and core finance processes including AP, AR, GL and reconciliation), HR (HCM), Procurement, Payroll, Property, and Legal systems, and their integration within enterprise architectures.
- Integration & Data Architecture - Designs enterprise integration patterns and data flows across complex system landscapes, ensuring consistency, scalability, and trusted enterprise data across finance and corporate domains.
- Cloud, Modern Architecture & Delivery Practices - Applies modern architecture principles including cloud-native design, SaaS platforms, API-led integration, microservices, and DevOps practices to enable scalable and resilient platforms.
- Architecture Governance & Risk Management - Owns architectural governance, standards, and decision-making frameworks. Identifies and mitigates risks across security, compliance, scalability, resilience, and long-term maintainability.
- Stakeholder Influence & Strategic Advisory - Engages and influences senior stakeholders by translating complex architectural concepts into business-aligned decisions, shaping enterprise direction and investment priorities.
Behavioural Competencies
- Systems Thinking & Complexity Management - Simplifies complex enterprise landscapes into coherent architecture strategies, ensuring alignment across multiple domains, constraints, and competing priorities.
- Strategic Alignment & Planning - Aligns architecture direction with enterprise strategy and business outcomes, defining actionable roadmaps that balance short-term delivery with long-term transformation
- Accountability & Decision Ownership - Takes ownership of architectural decisions at enterprise scale, ensuring clarity, consistency, and adherence to agreed principles and standards.
- Business & Commercial Insight - Applies strong understanding of business drivers, financial constraints, and industry trends to shape pragmatic, value-driven architectural decisions.
- Execution Leadership - Drives progress across complex initiatives by enabling clarity, removing ambiguity, and ensuring architectural decisions translate into effective delivery outcomes.
About Us
We’re a much-loved brand with an exciting future. Our Islanders are a diverse bunch of bright, talented people who love working together – and are proud of the work they do. Progression here can take you in all kinds of directions. This is what a career at River Island is like. And this is where yours starts.
This role is based at our Head Office in West London.
Keeping You Safe: At River Island we are committed to safeguarding all of our employees regardless of age or job role. We will fulfil our obligation under the Prevent duty which seeks to stop extremism and extremist views from materialising in our business. We promote and encourage the belief in British Values- including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. To find out more, please visit www.gov.uk.
Our Island is made up of a diverse community, where we all belong and feel part of something bigger. We are committed to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We will consider flexible working requests for all roles unless operational requirements prevent otherwise. To find out more about this interview process, check out our hiring process below.
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