Enterprise Architect - Manchester, England, United Kingdom

Janes Group; Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

27 days leave

Half-day wellbeing every 6 months

Private medical insurance – BUPA

Maternity pay

Paternity pay

Life cover

LinkedIn Learning

Job summary

Janes seeks an Enterprise Architect to connect enterprise direction to practical design and delivery. You will chair architecture forums, set governance, and guide engineers toward secure, scalable cloud solutions across a complex data domain including AI, APIs, and data platforms.

You will influence stakeholders across Product, Security, and Engineering, shaping architecture artefacts, roadmaps, and tooling while maintaining hands-on engagement with delivery teams.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in enterprise and solution architecture for complex data products.
• Strong software engineering and systems background.
• Experience leading architecture governance and forums.
• Experience maturing architecture tooling and frameworks.
• Experience across cloud-native data platforms with security and risk focus.
• Ability to influence stakeholders across Product, Commercial, Security, Service, and Engineering.
• Ability to explain complex topics to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Willingness to roll up sleeves to lead through challenges.

Responsibilities

• Act as the face of Architecture for Janes and be the senior architecture authority within Engineering.
• Chair architecture forums and ensure governance for decision‑making, with decisions evidenced and traceable into delivery.
• Enable engineers and architects to make good decisions within clear guardrails, avoiding bottlenecks while guiding direction.
• Bridge enterprise and solution architecture: translate target direction into implementable designs and transition plans.
• Oversee architecture across the product technology domain, partnering with Data and Software Architects, Principal Platform Engineer, and Engineering Managers.

Skills

Enterprise architecture

Solution architecture

Governance leadership

Cloud-native data platforms

Stakeholder influence

Clear technical communication

Hands-on leadership

Tools

AWS

Job description

Janes equips defence, government, and industry leaders with objective, accurate, and shareable data and analysis. Our experts combine advanced technology with proven tradecraft to deliver validated and contextual intelligence to assess threats, accelerate decisions, and anticipate change with confidence. We deliver our intelligence with the flexibility to fuse it with multiple sources in any system, enrich AI solutions, or access it through our portal.

Job purpose:

Janes is evolving a complex product and technology estate to deepen customer value and strengthen itsintelligence advantage. This includes enhancing our Single Intelligence Environment, expanding customerdelivery and integration, and moving safely from legacy platforms while meeting demanding security, compliance,and accreditation needs.

We are looking for an Enterprise Architect who can connect enterprise direction through to solution design anddelivery. This role will be the face of Architecture for Janes and the senior architecture authority withinEngineering, setting clear direction while working closely with teams to turn strategy into practical designs anddelivery. The role spans an AWS-focused product technology domain with complex defenceintelligence data: content and data processing and management, AI and machine learning services, master andreference data, graph and search, APIs, internal analyst and customer-facing portals, and direct-to-customer datadelivery.

This role suits a hands-on individual contributor who is comfortable using influence to enable change. Thesuccessful candidate will chair architecture forums, lead decision-making through lightweight governance,maintain architecture artefacts and standards, and evolve tooling capabilities. This role may suit someone on aHead of Architecture track who enjoys remaining technically engaged. It is not suitable for anyone who wants toremain divorced from delivery and the realities and responsibilities that come with it.

How you will contribute at Janes:

• Act as the face of Architecture for Janes and be the senior architecture authority within Engineering.
• Chair architecture forums and ensure appropriate governance is in place to enable decision-making. Ensuredecisions are timely, evidenced, and traceable into delivery.
• Enable engineers and architects to make good decisions within clear guardrails, avoiding unnecessarybottlenecks while maintaining clear architecture direction.
• Bridge enterprise and solution architecture: maintain a coherent view of target direction and translate it intoimplementable designs, transition plans, and delivery choices.
• Oversee enterprise and solution architecture across the product technology domain, partnering with the Data andSoftware Architects, Principal Platform Engineer, and Engineering Managers.
• Engage day to day with stakeholders across Demand and Delivery, Engineering, Security, and Service, and buildstrong relationships with Product, Content, Sales, and Customer Success.
• Maintain and mature architecture artefacts and tooling, roadmaps, and decision records.
• Shape designs to facilitate initiatives and cross-team deliveries, making system boundaries, dependencies, andtrade-offs clear.
• Ensure security, risk, and service considerations are addressed from the outset and throughout.
• Surface technical debt, architectural risks, and cross-team dependencies early; agree pragmatic mitigation andtransition paths that protect delivery timelines.
• Connect architectural choices to business value and customer outcomes.

The ideal skills and experience for this role are:

• Extensive experience in enterprise and solution architecture covering complex data products and platforms.
• Strong software engineering and systems background, with credibility to work through architecture and designdetails with engineers.
• Experience leading architecture governance and forums that focus on decision-making and getting things done.
• Experience maturing architecture tooling and frameworks, with a good understanding of what level of detail worksin practice.
• Experience across cloud-native and complex data platforms that consider security, risk, and service.
• Ability to influence stakeholders across Product, Commercial, Security, Service, and Engineering.
• Ability to bring clarity to complex topics, explaining options and consequences to technical and non-technicalaudiences.
• Willingness to roll your sleeves up when required to lead through challenges, whether setting direction, designing,unblocking delivery, or responding to incidents.
• 27 days of annual leave
• Healthy half (0.5 day leave every 6 months for wellbeing)
• Private medical insurance – BUPA
• Maternity (100% of basic salary for the first 26 weeks followed by Statutory Maternity Pay)
• Paternity (100% of basic salary for 6 weeks)
• Life cover
• Access to LinkedIn Learning

Life at Janes

We believe Janes is truly a great place to work. Our values and leadership code drive everything we do, and we understand that the right behaviours and culture will always result in the best outcomes for our customers, our colleagues, our shareholders, and our business. We provide a supportive, stretching, and dynamic environment with the ability for you to grow rapidly, both personally and professionally.

Janes is an inclusive and equal opportunities employer and encourages applications regardless of age, race, disability, religion / belief, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy/maternity, or gender.

Although this role is advertised as full time, Janes believed that flexibility at work can provide many significant benefits both to our colleagues and the business. We already work in a hybrid style across all offices and regions and can support different ways of working and offer different flexible working arrangements. So, if you are interested and have any requirements or needs in the way you would like to work, please apply, and speak to us about this. We will always consider part time or flexible applications

If successful in our recruitment process, your employment is conditional upon a Basic Criminal Background Check (DBS), right to work, ID check, references and a social media check- please state that you are comfortable with this.

Demographic Questions

We invite applicants to share their demographic data to help identify areas of improvement in our hiring process. We collect demographic data to better understand the diversity of our candidate pool allowing us t assess the effectiveness of our recruitment efforts. As an equal opportunity employer committed to including hiring, we use the aggregated and anonymous data to help inform and improve our recruitment strategic. Providing this data is entirely voluntary and will not impact hiring outcomes in any way. Additionally, we are unable to link your responses to your application, ensuring complete confidentiality.