Missions Architect

Apply on JLP Jobs - the official careers website for John Lewis Partnership, John Lewis & Partners, and Waitrose & Partners.

The Partnership is the UK’s most successful omni‑channel retailer which includes two of the UKs most loved department store and grocery brands with annual sales revenues in excess of £12B. Architecture and Engineering are responsible for technical strategies across the value streams of our business. For our trading brands these value streams include eCommerce, Shops, Supply Chain and Customer. The Architecture and Engineering leads in the value streams are responsible for helping to solve large complex business problems with consistent and effective architecture and engineering approaches.

Change is led across a mixed technology estate (ranging from mainframe to microservices) with various resourcing models. Our Architects work collaboratively and share knowledge, and learning is extremely important to us. We support our Architects to continuously improve their skills and keep abreast of the latest techniques and technologies. Architects work collaboratively with peers from Business, Product, Delivery, and Engineering.

John Lewis are recruiting for a Missions Enterprise Architect to lead on complex Missions that drive business and technology outcomes across multiple John Lewis value streams. This role will report into the Head of John Lewis Architecture and Engineering.

• Contract type - This position is a permanent contract.

• Flexible Working - This is a hybrid working role, therefore your time will primarily be split between working from home (in the UK) and London Head Office. However, there will also be an expectation to visit other locations as the need arises.

• This role is expected to visit the office up to twice a week, though occasionally business needs may require more frequent attendance. Our offices are open five days a week for those who prefer to work from the office more regularly.

• The Mission Architect serves as the single, accountable Enterprise Architect for a critical business Mission, translating commercial strategy into a resilient, flow‑optimised technology roadmap. Your primary function is to provide the architectural strategy required to support a complex, cross value‑stream business outcome, ensuring technology design directly drives customer and commercial value.

• You will help to understand the business problem space and define the domain boundaries to help define an adaptive architecture to enable the business to pivot where required. This includes advising on technology investments for large, often disruptive, incremental change to validate that expected benefits outweigh costs and align to business strategies - to do this you must work collaboratively with technical and non‑technical stakeholders in each of the affected value streams.

• You are the designer of the socio‑technical system for the Mission. While Principal Engineers drive engineering execution, you define and evolve domain boundaries to ensure the architecture minimises organisational friction and enables fast flow and high team autonomy. You will work directly with the Principle Engineer, especially within legacy environments, to maximise the discoverability and testability of services, ensuring all technology choices inherently support modern CI/CD practices and operational stability.

• Partnering with Product and Business stakeholders, you must deeply understand the problem space and user needs. You translate these requirements by mapping business capability to technical architecture, acting as the credible bridge between strategy and execution. Your oversight ensures solutions maximise product value and efficiency, explicitly balancing the in‑year benefit of MVPs with the multi‑year necessity of realising strategic capabilities.

• To do this you will collaborate closely with key stakeholders such as Product Leads, Delivery and Operations Managers, Infrastructure Leads as well as working closely with other Enterprise Architects, Solution Architects and Principal Engineers.

Internally the role is known as Enterprise Architect.