Enterprise Architect

This role is Office Flexible

We're looking for an experienced Enterprise Architect to join our award-winning Technology team and play a pivotal role in shaping the future technology landscape of Mitchells & Butlers.

Reporting to the Head of Technology Strategy, Architecture & Platforms, you will be responsible for defining and evolving our enterprise technology strategy, ensuring every technology investment supports our long-term business ambitions.

Acting as a strategic leader across the organisation, you'll connect business goals, technology capabilities and architectural direction to create a clear architectural direction for the future.

This is a highly influential role where you'll establish enterprise-wide architecture principles, guide major technology decisions and provide strategic oversight across our technology estate.

You'll work closely with senior business and technology stakeholders to drive modernisation, improve capability maturity and ensure our platforms, data and digital services continue to evolve in line with business priorities.

Based at our Birmingham City Centre Head Office, this role offers a flexible hybrid working approach.

You’ll be rewarded with

• 33% discount across all M&B brands.
• 20% Friends & Family discount for up to five people.
• Annual bonus scheme.
• Option to buy up to two additional weeks of holiday.
• Matched pension contributions (up to 1.5x your contribution).
• Private healthcare and dental plan.
• Cycle to Work and wellbeing schemes.
• 26 days annual leave plus bank holidays.
• Hybrid working and flexible approach.
• What you’ll be doing in this Enterprise Architect role
• Own the development and ongoing maintenance of the Technology Strategy, ensuring it remains aligned to BC&T Vision, business strategy, emerging technology and the changing needs of M&B.
• Translate strategic business ambitions into technology principles, target capabilities, strategic technology choices and clear direction for BC&T.
• Define, document and maintain current, target and transition enterprise architectures across the technology estate.
• Maintain enterprise architecture principles, standards and guardrails that enable consistent decision-making while allowing teams to deliver at pace.
• Work with Roadmap Owners to ensure each technology domain has a current, credible multi-year roadmap.

Roadmap Owners remain accountable for the strategic direction, quality, maintenance and evolution of their individual domain roadmaps.

• Assure domain roadmaps for alignment to Technology Strategy, target architecture, business capabilities and strategic priorities, challenging gaps or divergence where required.
• Provide an enterprise-wide view across domain roadmaps, identifying cross-domain dependencies, sequencing issues, duplicated investment, capability gaps and opportunities for reuse, consolidation or simplification.
• Ensure roadmap investment progressively moves M&B towards agreed target states and provides an appropriate balance of modernisation, security and compliance, end-of-life and decommissioning, run and resilience.
• Work closely with Roadmap Governance to ensure roadmap management remains active and effective, while retaining clear separation between process governance and strategic architecture assurance.
• Maintain and evolve the enterprise technology capability model, working with domain owners to ensure clear capability ownership and alignment between capability progression and technology investment.
• Provide strategic architecture input into investment, portfolio and prioritisation decisions, making the implications of technology choices, dependencies, lifecycle and technical debt clear.
• Bridge the gap between long-term strategic direction and practical delivery, working with Solution Architects and delivery teams to define transition architectures, reusable patterns and pragmatic stepping stones towards target states.
• Identify opportunities to simplify and rationalise the technology estate, reduce technical debt, improve interoperability and reuse, and retire legacy technology where appropriate.
• Lead M&B’s thinking on emerging technologies, including AI, cloud, data, integration and platform evolution, assessing their relevance, opportunities and risks for M&B.
• Work with strategic technology partners and suppliers to understand product direction and ensure supplier roadmaps support M&B Technology Strategy and target architecture.
• Communicate complex technology strategy and architecture clearly to senior technology and business stakeholders, creating shared understanding of direction, choices, trade-offs and implications.
• Lead enterprise architecture assurance and act as strategic design authority for material or cross-domain technology decisions, ensuring alignment to Technology Strategy, principles, standards and target architectures.
• Own the architecture exception process, ensuring departures from agreed standards are proportionate, time-bound and have an appropriate transition path.
• Shape technology initiatives early in the demand and investment lifecycle, identifying strategic fit, dependencies, reuse opportunities and architectural implications before significant commitments are made.
• Shape significant business cases and investment proposals from an architecture perspective, ensuring appropriate technology options and trade-offs are considered before solutions are selected.
• Develop and maintain enterprise reference architectures and reusable patterns across key areas such as cloud, integration, identity, data, security and platforms.
• Set architectural guardrails for innovation, proof-of-concepts and test-and-learn activity, enabling experimentation without creating unmanaged technology risk.
• Lead enterprise architecture across the architecture community, ensuring Solution Architects and domain specialists consistently apply common principles, patterns and strategic direction.
• What you’ll need to bring to this Enterprise Architect role
• Strategic thinking and ability to translate business strategy into clear technology direction.
• Strong enterprise architecture and capability modelling knowledge.
• Broad understanding of modern enterprise technologies, including cloud, data, integration, security and AI.
• Strong commercial judgement across value, cost, risk, resilience and lifecycle.
• Excellent communication, influencing and stakeholder management.
• Pragmatic decision-making, able to set guardrails without slowing delivery.
• Ability to challenge constructively and simplify complex technology choices.
• Key Experience
• Senior enterprise architecture or technology strategy roles in complex organisations.
• Defining and maintaining Technology Strategy and target architectures.
• Developing transition architectures and modernising legacy estates.
• Operating architecture governance, assurance, standards and exceptions.
• Shaping major technology investments and strategic options.
• Assuring multi-year technology roadmaps.
• Leading and influencing architects, technology teams and senior stakeholders.
• Working with strategic suppliers and partners.

Qualifications

• Demonstrable experience in enterprise architecture, technology strategy or a comparable senior architecture role.
• Relevant architecture or technology qualification desirable.

Practical experience and evidence of strategic impact are more important than a specific architecture framework certification.

What makes Mitchells & Butlers a great place to work?

At M&B we value the unique perspectives each person brings.

We believe that by fostering a culture of inclusion, respect, and allyship, we create a sense of belonging, engagement and teamwork which are essential to delivering great guest experiences.

Join us and be a part of a great team!

Compensation: Competitive salary

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