Solution Architect

KFC; Johannesburg; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Job summary

KFC Africa is seeking an experienced Solution/Enterprise Architect to lead the design of its digital ecosystem across channels including App, Web, Kiosk, WhatsApp, and back-end platforms. You will translate the future roadmap into actionable architectures and ensure on-time delivery with secure, scalable, and cost-effective solutions.

Responsibilities include creating reference architectures, governance, data contracts, and coordinating with squads and vendors to align with the D+T strategy and

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7–10+ years in solution/enterprise/application architecture for consumer digital or e-commerce.
• Strong grounding in cloud architectures, networking, security, and integration patterns.
• Leadership on non-functional requirements (security, privacy, performance, availability, observability).
• Experience with data contracts, event schemas, identity/consent, analytics and customer data platform activation.
• Ability to produce clear architecture artefacts and guide vendors to comply.

Responsibilities

• Reference architectures and patterns: approved designs for journeys and services.
• Designs and artefacts for initiatives: diagrams, non-functional checklists, data contracts.
• Standards and governance: security, privacy, availability, performance, observability.
• Data layer and contracts: event schemas, identity/consent, data platform integration.
• Cost and reliability guidance: FinOps guardrails and SLAs; design reviews.

Skills

Solution architecture

Enterprise architecture

Cloud architectures

Security by design

Data contracts

Leadership

Education

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

At KFC, we pride ourselves on being original. We even named our recipe after it. But for us, the answer to the question is simple. Be You. Everyone at KFC is different. Unique. It’s what makes us special - Our people, The Originals. And we welcome you to join us. Bring your individuality to the table. Bring your grit and energy. Bring your spirit. Your story. Your drive and your passion. Bring it. Every piece of you. Even the parts you don’t like. Because we value our people no matter what. We’ll feed your potential and we’ll support you; to be your best self, to make a difference, and have fun. Together, we can be part of something truly extraordinary. All you have to do, is Bring it.

This role requires you to owns the solution design and architecture standards that power KFC Africa’s digital ecosystem. Aligns to the Digital & Technology (D+T) strategy and global standards to ensure solutions are secure, reliable, scalable, cost-effective, and future-fit across channels (App, Web, Kiosk, WhatsApp, Aggregators) and back-end platforms (point of sale, customer relationship management, loyalty, payments, data and analytics, customer data platform). Translates the future architecture roadmap into actionable reference architectures, patterns, and reviews so squads and vendors can deliver on-standard and on-time

Responsibilities

• Reference architectures and patterns: Approved designs for common journeys and services (identity, ordering, menu, payments, offers, loyalty execution, notifications, analytics and customer data platform integration).
• Designs and artefacts for initiatives: Context and container diagrams, sequence and deployment diagrams, non-functional requirement checklists, and data contracts for each major initiative.
• Standards and governance: Security, privacy, availability, performance, accessibility, observability, and coding/integration standards; clear go/no-go criteria and waiver process.
• Data layer and contracts: Event schemas, taxonomy, identity and consent standards, and customer data platform and reverse extract-transform-load patterns in partnership with Insights and Customer Relationship Management.
• Cost and reliability guidance: FinOps guardrails and service-level objective targets; design reviews that balance resilience, latency, and unit economics.
• Vendor/technology evaluations: Requests for information (RFIs), proofs of concept, and recommendations mapped to roadmap needs and total cost of ownership.

Communication Required

• Enablement Lead and Delivery Manager: Translate roadmap into standards and phased designs; plan cutovers and non-functional requirement validation.
• Channel Leads, Product Managers, and Brand: Shape solution options that meet channel strategy; clarify trade-offs and dependencies.
• Engineering and vendor technical leads: Run design workshops, backlog refinement for technical stories, and review pull requests aligned to standards.
• Customer Insights and Analytics, and Customer Relationship Management: Define events, identity/consent flows, and customer data platform destinations; validate measurement and activation feasibility.
• Security, Privacy, and Legal: Ensure compliance with policy and regulation; address data residency, retention, and access controls.
• Finance and Procurement: Support business cases, total cost of ownership models, and commercial terms tied to architectural choices.
• Global architecture counterparts: Align on global blueprints and submit waivers or change proposals when justified.

Problem Solving And Analysis

• Integration complexity: Standardize patterns for point of sale, loyalty execution, payment gateways, aggregators, and delivery providers; manage versioning, backward compatibility, timeouts, retries, and idempotency.
• Security and privacy by design: Enforce least-privilege access, secret management, encryption in transit and at rest, tokenization for payments, and compliance with payment card industry and data protection standards.
• Scalability and performance: Model load, identify bottlenecks across front-end to application programming interface to integration layers, set performance budgets, and guide caching and asynchronous design.
• Reliability and observability: Define service-level objectives, error budgets, logging/metrics/tracing, and incident correlation; design for graceful degradation and failover.
• Cost optimization: Recommend architectures that reduce unit cost (compute, storage, network egress, licensing) without sacrificing resilience or speed.
• Data correctness and activation: Prevent event schema drift; ensure the right attributes land in analytics and customer data platform destinations with correct consent and latency; design fallbacks.
• Trade-off decisions: Use structured decision records to balance scope, schedule, quality, and risk; make options and impacts explicit for leadership

Innovation

Enhances and creates new architectural practices. Maintains a living architecture runway and tech radar; runs proofs of concept and spikes; introduces platform engineering patterns (paved roads, internal developer platform, policy-as-code, infrastructure-as-code); promotes canary and blue-green releases, feature flags, and automated quality gates.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Experience

• 7-10+ years in solution/enterprise/application architecture for consumer digital or e-commerce; multi-market experience preferred.
• Strong grounding in cloud architectures (for example, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud), networking, security, and integration patterns (representational state transfer/gRPC, event streaming, messaging).
• Demonstrated leadership on non-functional requirements (security, privacy, performance, availability, observability) and design for reliability.
• Experience with data contracts, event schemas, identity/consent, analytics and customer data platform activation.
• Ability to produce clear architecture artefacts (diagrams, decision records, standards) and guide vendors to comply.