Director II, Technical Architecture

Address: USA-IL-Chicago-300 South Riverside Plaza
Store Code: Arch/Data Domain Architecture (5119207)
Ahold Delhaize USA, a division of global food retailer Ahold Delhaize, is part of the U.S. family of brands, which includes five leading omnichannel grocery brands - Food Lion, Giant Food, The GIANT Company, Hannaford and Stop & Shop. Our associates support the brands with a wide range of services, including Finance, Legal, Sustainability, Commercial, Digital and E-commerce, Technology and more.
Primary Purpose
The Director II, Technology Architecture is responsible for defining and leading the infrastructure and technology architecture strategy and governance across ADUSA. This role involves managing a broad scope, directly engaging with senior leadership, and guiding large-scale architecture decisions across both infrastructure and technology.
The role provides leadership for enterprise architecture, IT strategy, solution delivery, and risk management, while ensuring the highest levels of compliance, security, and operational excellence.
High-level Responsibilities:• Lead and manage a team of technology (platform) architects, focusing on delivering Reference Architectures and Decision Frameworks for IT infrastructure and strategy for the largest grocery retailer on the East Coast, serving millions of omnichannel customers each week.• Collaborate with key stakeholders across various business functions to create technology strategies, roadmaps, and standards that align with company goals.• Translate complex business needs into cutting-edge IT solutions, ensuring these architectures solve critical business challenges and meet industry standards and compliance.• Responsible for making architecture decisions, guiding system design and development involving servers, private/public cloud, storage, networking, virtualization, and security.• Responsible for the continuous improvement of the current architecture, including modernization, hardware refresh, and system consolidation.• Lead major enterprise architecture initiatives, ensuring alignment with operational strategies and successful delivery from planning to execution.
Our flexible/ hybrid work schedule includes 3 in-person days at one of our core locations and 2 remote days. Our core office locations include Salisbury, NC, Chicago, IL, Quincy, MA, Carlisle, PA, Scarborough, ME, Hyattsville, MD and Mauldin, SC.
Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis.
Duties and Responsibilities
Leadership:• Lead technology (platform) architects and partner with engineering and solution architects to develop a robust architecture strategy to support our business and technology platforms across Ahold Delhaize USA• Create a high-performing culture that drives business value through technology.• Recruit, develop and retain a high-performing technology architects• Establish a center of architectural excellence within the organization, fostering innovation and embedding architectural thinking in all IT processes.• Mentor and coach IT architects, ensuring talent development and strong succession planning.• Challenge and drive changes to improve business performance, increase agility, and optimize resources.
Professional Standards, Policies & Ways of Working:• Lead the development of architecture principles, reference architectures, standards, and reference models for infrastructure and technology as outlined in our Retail Taxonomy.• Actively participate in operating and steering committee meetings to deliver secure, redundant, and high-performance infrastructure technology stack across multiple brands• Govern IT decision-making processes to ensure compliance with architecture principles, maintaining consistency across business units.• Responsible for development and delivery of Reference Architectures in IT infrastructure, strategy and road map formulation in support of the Architecture function and mission
IT Strategy and Roadmap:• Define and manage the overarching IT strategy, roadmap, and lifecycle management plan, ensuring alignment with the organization's strategic and financial goals.• Lead the execution of the IT roadmap, ensuring that architecture principles and target states are achieved.• Oversee the translation of IT strategy into domain-specific architecture roadmaps, ensuring coherence and alignment with business priorities.
Risk, Compliance & Security:• Define and govern architecture principles to ensure that all solutions adhere to security, privacy, and regulatory standards.• Lead the governance process to ensure compliance with these principles across all projects and solutions.
Innovation & New Technology:• Stay at the forefront of emerging technologies and trends, integrating innovation into the IT strategy to accelerate delivery of business objectives.• Collaborate with external vendors to incorporate their technology roadmaps into the organization's strategy.
Enterprise Architecture Operation:• Ensure the enterprise architecture's consistency by managing the transition from current to future state, considering the best use of legacy, new-bespoke, and package solutions.• Work closely with executive management to align business goals with IT architecture strategy, ensuring business needs drive technological solutions.
Financial Management:• Align IT architecture decisions with the financial budget and long-range business plans, ensuring cost-effective solutions.• Manage the organization's technical debt, factoring it into budget planning and architecture lifecycle management.
Additional job duties may be assigned as needed to meet the needs of the business and support our Values.
Qualifications• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, or a related field; advanced certifications (e.g., TOGAF, ITIL) are preferred.• 13+ years of relevant working experience, 5+ years leading teams.• Extensive experience in enterprise architecture strategy, leadership, and governance.• Works under broad direction, operating with significant responsibility for defining and delivering the enterprise architecture strategy. Has substantial personal authority and autonomy to set architecture policies and direction.• Influences and leads organization-wide architecture strategy and decisions. Directly engages with executive and senior leadership to secure buy-in and alignment across business units.• Solves highly complex and strategically significant architecture challenges, integrating both legacy and new technologies to achieve business objectives.• Demonstrates high-level strategic thinking, communication, and negotiation skills. Plays a leading role in shaping long-term business and IT strategy.
Preferred Qualifications• Post graduate degree advanced training and or certifications in relevant field/s of study preferred.• 5+ or more years' experience in Agile teams and Product/Platform based operating model, Practical Experience in Agile Architecture.• Experience in retail or grocery.• Knowledge of DevOps processes (including CI/CD) and Infrastructure as code fundamentals.• Consultancy Skills.• Experienced in Agile Architecture and ArchiMate Modeling.
#li-mm1 #li-hybrid
At Ahold Delhaize USA, we provide services to one of the largest portfolios of grocery companies in the nation, and we're actively seeking top talent. Our team shares a common motivation to drive change, take ownership and enable our brands to better care for their customers. We thrive on supporting great local grocery brands and their strategies.
We offer an experience where our associates are valued; Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging are infused in our business and our employees are representative of the communities that we serve. We believe in total wellness, which encompasses a blend of physical, financial and emotional wellness.
We believe in collaboration, curiosity, and continuous learning in all that we think, create and do. While building a culture where personal and professional growth are just as important as business growth, we invest in our people, empowering them to learn, grow and deliver at all levels of the business.
Job Requisition: 397659_external_USA-IL-Chicago