Enterprise Architect – Technical Strategy

Motability Operations Ltd; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Motability Operations is seeking an Enterprise Architect with a strong technical focus to translate enterprise direction into actionable technical strategy and clear guidance for engineering teams. This role shapes cross-domain architecture, partners with the Business Architect and Engineering Managers, and helps teams balance modernisation with legacy systems while maintaining service continuity.

You'll drive pragmatic patterns, governance, and an architecture knowledge base to support delivery

Qualifications

• Experience shaping enterprise technology strategy.
• Influence across multiple domains and change programs.
• Experience working with senior engineers and architects.
• Knowledge of APIs, identity, cloud, resilience and operability.

Responsibilities

• Shape enterprise technical strategy and architecture direction.
• Provide practical guidance and patterns for cross-cutting areas (integration, APIs, identity, service design).
• Establish governance approaches and surface significant architectural decisions.
• Build a connected architecture knowledge system to keep domain decisions visible.
• Support Product Architects and Technical Principals through peer review and collaboration.

Skills

Enterprise architecture

Cross-domain strategy

Stakeholder management

Modelling techniques

AI awareness

Cloud & APIs

Job description

About The Role

We're looking for an Enterprise Architect with a strong technical focus to turn enterprise direction into practical technical strategy and clear guidance for engineering teams.

About The Role

We're looking for an Enterprise Architect with a strong technical focus to turn enterprise direction into practical technical strategy and clear guidance for engineering teams. This is a new, influential role with the opportunity to shape cross-domain technical direction and how architecture supports engineering across the organisation. You will work alongside another Enterprise Architect focused on business strategy and enterprise change, and our Business Architect. Together, these roles provide complementary, cross-cutting architecture leadership across the organisation. Your focus will be cross-domain technical strategy, modern engineering practices and consistent, sustainable technical decision-making. Product Architects retain architecture leadership within their domains, and engineering teams retain detailed design responsibility. Your role is to provide enterprise direction, connect thinking across domains and help resolve complex cross-cutting challenges. You will partner closely with Engineering Managers, Technical Principals and Product Architects, while they retain accountability for architecture, engineering leadership and technical outcomes within their domains.

What You'll Be Doing

Shape enterprise technical strategy

• Turn business priorities and enterprise direction into clear technical choices, principles and shared direction
• Lead technical thinking on significant cross-domain challenges, surfacing risks, dependencies and opportunities
• Shape the technical dimension of strategic planning, investment decisions and build, buy or reuse choices, considering value, cost, risk and long-term maintainability
• Shape pragmatic modernisation paths that balance new capabilities, legacy technology, technical debt and service continuity

Enable teams with practical guidance

• Co-create practical patterns across integration, APIs, identity, service design and other cross-cutting areas
• Help teams define clear domain boundaries and shared language using appropriate modelling and architecture techniques
• Bring Data, Platform, Security and DevEx standards together as practical guidance that teams can use
• Support Product Architects and Technical Principals through peer support, review and the Architecture Community of Practice

Create visibility and proportionate governance

• Bring domain views together to show the wider technical landscape, dependencies, risks and opportunities
• Establish practical approaches to surfacing architecture debt, technical risks and significant decisions
• Facilitate resolution of cross-domain disagreements and elevate material trade-offs through the appropriate route
• Help ensure governance enables good decisions without adding unnecessary approval layers

Build a connected architecture knowledge system

• Establish a connected view of domains, systems, services, ownership, decisions and technical guidance
• Make architecture information current, structured and useful to engineers, architects and AI-enabled tools
• Integrate architecture documentation with engineering sources and workflows where practical
• Work with Product Architects to keep domain architecture, decisions and architecture debt visible and connected

About You

• Pragmatic about architecture, standards, documentation and governance, with a focus on helping teams make better decisions and deliver well
• Able to move between enterprise-level strategy and detailed technical discussions
• Curious about emerging technology, including AI, with the judgement to assess where it can add value and the risks or trade-offs involved
• Able to work effectively with senior stakeholders, constructively question established approaches and influence without relying on formal authority
• Able to communicate complex ideas clearly, facilitate constructive discussions, build effective relationships and recognise when domain teams should own the answer

Minimum Criteria

• Substantial engineering and architecture experience, including operating at enterprise architecture or equivalent strategic level, with responsibility for shaping direction across multiple teams, systems and domains
• Proven experience influencing enterprise technology strategy, investment decisions and significant cross-domain change
• Experience working with senior engineers and architects on complex software, platform and technology decisions
• Broad knowledge of modern architecture across areas such as APIs and integration, identity, cloud, resilience and operability
• Experience applying modelling techniques and creating practical principles, guardrails, standards, patterns and decision-making approaches
• Good understanding of the architectural implications of AI and other emerging technologies

About The Company

Motability Operations is a unique organisation, virtually one of a kind. We combine a strong sense of purpose with a real commercial edge to ensure we provide the best possible worry-free mobility solutions to over 800,000 customers and their families across the UK. Customers exchange their higher rate mobility allowance to lease a range of affordable vehicles (cars, wheelchair accessible vehicles, scooters, and powered wheelchairs) with insurance, maintenance and breakdown assistance included. We are the largest car fleet operator in the UK (purchasing around