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Signet Jewelers is the world's largest retailer of diamond jewelry, operating more than 2,800 stores worldwide under the iconic brands: Kay Jewelers, Zales, Jared, H.Samuel, Ernest Jones, Peoples, Banter by Piercing Pagoda, Rocksbox, JamesAllen.com and Diamonds Direct. We are a people-first company and this core value is at the heart of everything we do, from empowering our valued team members, to collaborating with our customers, to fostering the communities in which we live and serve. People – and the love their actions inspire – are what drive us. We’re not only proud of the love we inspire outside our walls, we’re especially proud of the diversity, inclusion and equity we’re inspiring inside. There are dynamic career paths awaiting you – rewarding opportunities to impact the lives of others and inspire love. Join us!
Signet Jewelers — the world's largest retailer of diamond jewelry — is seeking a VP, Chief Architect to serve as the principal architectural authority across our unified Digital & Technology (D&T) organization, reporting to the CDTO.
This is a senior individual-contributor role: no delivery organization or reporting line, but the cross-cutting technical judgment that holds Signet's portfolio of banners (Kay, Zales, Jared, Blue Nile, James Allen, Diamonds Direct, and more) together as one platform. The Chief Architect is the CDTO's most trusted technical partner — able to step into any initiative, understand its true business intent, and ensure it's built on the right foundations.
The mandate is grounded in Signet's “Grow Brand Love” and “Connected Commerce” strategy, and the D&T priorities of platform harmonization, enterprise AI adoption, and Blue Nile integration.
This role defines and upholds the principles every initiative is held to:
- Outcome before architecture — architecture follows business and customer intent, never the reverse.
- Harmonize over proliferate — one enterprise platform expressed as many brands.
- Own the core, accelerate the edges — standardize the durable core; buy and move fast at the edges.
- Simplify relentlessly — smallest architecture that meets the need; retire legacy, reduce redundancy.
- Decisions are explicit and durable — options, trade-offs, and rationale are captured and outlive the decision-makers.
- AI-native by default — engineering and operations are designed around AI-assisted, agentic ways of working.
Key Responsibilities
Enterprise Architecture & Target-State Strategy
- Own the cross-enterprise architectural view — current-state baseline, capability-to-system mapping, and a multi-year target-state architecture spanning commerce, store, supply chain, customer care, corporate, and data/AI.
- Define the enterprise technical roadmap with domain and platform leaders, and keep it continuously tested against business strategy.
Platform Harmonization & Simplification
- Lead harmonization of Signet's multi-brand technology estate, collapsing duplicative platforms and replacing brand-by-brand sprawl with shared foundations.
- Drive architectural integration of Blue Nile and future acquisitions into the unified platform without eroding brand distinctiveness.
- Make simplification measurable — track reduction of redundant systems and technical debt.
Standards, Governance & Initiative Assurance
- Establish enterprise architecture standards, reference patterns, and lightweight decision governance (ADRs, decision gates).
- Serve as architectural arbiter for the CDTO on cross-cutting decisions and as primary liaison to the Enterprise Architecture team.
- Review significant programs at inception and key gates; catch misalignment early and steer initiatives back to their true business intent.
Strategic Initiative Architecture
- Provide hands-on architectural leadership on a select few highest-impact, cross-domain initiatives (e.g., commerce platform modernization, CMS, order management, customer data).
- Stay selective — most domain-specific architecture remains with domain architects; this role engages where the cross-portfolio view is decisive.
AI-Enabled Engineering
- Drive the shift to an AI-assisted, agentic development model with integrated, end-to-end SDLC capability.
- Architect patterns that make agentic and AI-native systems safe and scalable (orchestration, MCP-based integration, guardrails).
- Build a small, skilled internal team, reducing reliance on external contractors over time.
Architecture Community & Executive Partnership
- Provide peer-level leadership to domain-embedded architects; run the enterprise Architecture Community of Practice and mentor across the organization.
- Build trust-based relationships with senior executives across Product, Marketing, Merchandising, Store Ops, Customer Care, Supply Chain, and Finance; serve as the CDTO's architectural voice in executive forums.
- Anchor every decision in customer/brand outcomes and clear economics (TCO, capex/opex, vendor terms).
Illustrative Architectural Domains
- Composable, multi-tenant commerce — headless, MACH-aligned storefronts, configurators, ring builders, virtual try-on.
- Distributed Order Management & real-time ATP — global inventory visibility, omnichannel fulfillment, event-driven integration.
- Diamond provenance & supply-chain integrity — Tracr blockchain ledger, responsible-sourcing claims.
- Customer data, personalization & clienteling — real-time CDP feeding unified profiles and next-best-action.
- Data, AI & corporate platforms — the enterprise data and agentic AI foundation.
Qualifications
- 15+ years of progressive technology experience, including time as Chief/Principal Architect, VP of Engineering, or CTO within a multi-brand, large-scale retail or e-commerce enterprise ($2B+ revenue).
- Practitioner architect — majority of career spent designing and shipping production systems alongside engineering teams, not strategy-only.
- Demonstrated cross-portfolio architecture ownership, ideally across distinct consumer brands sharing common infrastructure.
- Track record of platform consolidation, brand harmonization, and simplification at scale.
- Deep command of cloud, integration, event-driven, and headless/composable (MACH) architecture; hands-on fluency with a major cloud's serverless ecosystem (e.g., AWS).
- Track record authoring durable architecture artifacts (capability maps, C4 diagrams, ADRs) that teams actually use.
- Strong financial fluency and proven influence in a matrixed environment without reporting authority.
- Experience with AI-assisted SDLC practices and agentic AI architecture patterns.
- Bachelor's in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field; technical Master's preferred.
Preferred Experience
- Specialty retail or jewelry experience.
- SAP Commerce Cloud, IBM Sterling/Fluent/Manhattan OMS, headless CMS (AEM, Contentful, Contentstack), or Oracle Xstore at production scale.
- Real-time CDP (Adobe, Amperity, Salesforce) and/or Salesforce Sales/Service Cloud in retail contexts.
- Experience with permissioned distributed ledgers or heavy external APIs without adding latency.
- Multi-national e-commerce or omnichannel operations; familiarity with TOGAF, C4, or ArchiMate.
