Description:
The Solution Architect will take ownership of solution architecture design and associated technology roadmaps across the Finance estate. The role requires evaluating business needs, collaborating with delivery partners, and ensuring technology solutions are well aligned, cost effective, and architecturally sound. You will work closely with business, engineering, and partner teams to translate financial and accounting requirements into effective, scalable, and secure technical solutions.
You will lead the design of major programmes and initiatives, ensuring that solutions meet business requirements and align to architectural standards. The successful candidate will demonstrate strong stakeholder engagement, be confident in supporting and guiding other architects, and work effectively in a fast paced, change oriented environment. Collaboration will span teams including Finance, Commercial, Omnichannel, IT, and Analytics.
The Role:
- Lead creation, analysis, and review of solution architectures across a diverse portfolio of projects and programmes.
- Own the end to end design of solutions, ensuring alignment between business requirements and technical needs, using best practices, reference architectures, and reusable assets.
- Define system components, services, technologies, and designs spanning Business, Information, Application, and Technology architecture domains.
- Own the solution design for core finance capabilities, including the general ledger and sub ledgers, accounts payable and receivable, fixed assets, tax, treasury and cash management, financial consolidation and reporting, and planning and forecasting.
- Design the integration between Finance and the wider retail estate, spanning point of sale, e commerce, order management, merchandising, stock and supply chain, payments and settlement, and HR and payroll, ensuring data flows are complete, reconcilable, and auditable.
- Design solutions that support the end to end finance process flows of record to report, order to cash, and procure to pay, with appropriate controls, segregation of duties, and audit traceability built in.
- Ensure solutions meet financial control, reporting, and compliance obligations, including internal financial controls, statutory and external audit requirements, IFRS reporting, tax and VAT obligations, and PCI DSS for payment related flows.
- Design for period end close, high volume transaction posting, and sales and cash reconciliation at retail scale, balancing performance, cost, and data accuracy.
- Contribute to multiple complex or large scale programmes in a matrixed environment.
- Oversee and guide the development of solutions across hardware, software, operability, scalability, and associated business processes.
- Provide architectural leadership and oversight to delivery teams and engineering partners.
- Review software designs, architectural documentation, and technical capabilities to ensure alignment with strategy and standards.
Required Skills & Experience:
- Demonstrable experience architecting solutions across enterprise finance systems, ideally gained within a retail or multi channel commerce environment.
- Hands on architecture experience with at least one major ERP or finance platform (for example SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, or Workday Financials), together with associated sub ledgers, consolidation and reporting tools.
- Good understanding of how finance systems operate within a retailer and how they interact with surrounding systems, including point of sale, e commerce, order management, merchandising, stock and supply chain, payments and settlement, and HR and payroll.
- Good working understanding of financial and accounting concepts, including double entry bookkeeping, chart of accounts and cost centre structures, the relationship between the general ledger and sub ledgers, accruals and prepayments, revenue recognition, intercompany and multi currency accounting, and period end close and consolidation.
- Understanding of the end to end finance process flows of record to report, order to cash, and procure to pay, and the financial controls that operate within them.
- Experience designing high volume transactional interfaces, together with the reconciliation and exception handling needed to keep store and online sales, cash, and stock movements in balance.
- Awareness of the financial reporting, control, and compliance requirements applicable to a listed retailer, including IFRS, statutory and external audit requirements, tax and VAT obligations, and PCI DSS.
- Ability to engage credibly with senior Finance stakeholders and translate accounting requirements into technical design.