Director, Digital Partner - R&D

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Role Overview

We are seeking an experienced Enterprise Architect within the Supply Chain & R&D domains to shape and evolve the technology strategy and roadmap. This role plays a critical bridge between business strategy and technology execution, ensuring architecture decisions accelerate business outcomes, reduce complexity, and enable scalable, future-ready platforms.

You will partner closely with senior business and IT leaders, guide investment decisions, and provide architectural leadership across transformation initiatives in a global, fast-moving CPG environment.

What You'll Be Responsible For

Strategic Architecture & Business Alignment

• Drive enterprise architecture with a business-outcome lens across Supply Chain and R&D.
• Define and evolve the business technology strategy and multi-year roadmaps, covering applications, data, analytics, and integration.
• Translate business strategy into target-state architectures, capability models, and investment priorities.
• Proactively identify opportunities to digitize, modernize, and simplify business processes.

Architecture Governance & Portfolio Management

• Lead architecture governance, reference architecture development, and technology standards.
• Establish and mature application and technology portfolio management to increase transparency and reduce technical debt.
• Assess solution designs across business, data, application, and technology layers to identify optionality, risks and trade-offs.
• Accountable for High Level Designs across Supply Chain and R&D projects; ensuring solutions are fit-for-purpose and aligned with enterprise architecture principles.

Delivery Enablement & Technical Leadership

• Provide architectural leadership across the full SDLC, supporting both project-centric and product-centric operating models.
• Serve as architecture lead on complex initiatives, shaping solution design and ecosystem integration.
• Partner with delivery teams to guide design decisions and ensure architectural quality.
• Support build-vs-buy decisions and vendor evaluations; leading on software vendor selection exercises (RFPs).

Stakeholder Partnership & Influence

• Build strong relationships with business executives, product leaders, and technology partners.
• Communicate architecture direction and roadmaps in clear, compelling, executive-ready language.
• Act as a trusted advisor, able to challenge constructively and influence without authority.

Practice & Capability Development

• Mentor and coach architects, product teams, and stakeholders to instill strong architectural thinking.
• Contribute to the evolution of the Enterprise Architecture practice, operating model, and ways of working.
• Continuously monitor technology trends and disruptions relevant to Supply Chain, R&D, cloud, and data platforms.

Domain Expertise You Bring

• Strong functional knowledge of Supply Chain (e.g., IBP, Logistics, Warehousing).
• Solid understanding of R&D processes within a CPG environment.
• Hands-on experience architecting complex, integrated Supply Chain solutions.
• Deep familiarity with cloud and hybrid-cloud platforms, integration patterns, and modern application architectures.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
• 5-7 years of experience as an Enterprise Architect focused on Supply Chain.
• 4-6 years of prior experience in solution architecture or related technical roles.
• Demonstrated experience defining enterprise roadmaps and guiding large-scale transformations.

Core Competencies

• Systems thinking with the ability to balance long-term strategy and near-term delivery.
• Strong analytical skills with comfort assessing cost, risk, and value trade-offs.
• Executive-level communication and storytelling skills.
• Consulting mindset: collaborative, structured, and outcome-oriented.
• Ability to operate effectively in complex, federated, and politically nuanced environments.

Technical & Professional Skills

• Expertise in modern enterprise architecture concepts: SaaS, APIs, microservices, event-driven architectures, and analytics.
• Strong knowledge of domain/industry related technology landscape, accelerators and opportunities
• Experience in using AI solutions to bring business value in SC and R&D domains
• Strong understanding of operating models, financial management, and investment planning.
• Familiarity with EA frameworks, modeling tools, Agile and scaled Agile approaches.
• Proven leadership, facilitation, and stakeholder-management skills.

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