Lead Enterprise Architect, Engineering Excellence

Category/Area of Expertise: IT & Technology
Job Requisition: 535997
Address: USA-IL-Chicago-300 South Riverside Plaza
Store Code: IT Executive & Administration (5167642)
Ahold Delhaize USA, a division of global food retailer Ahold Delhaize, is part of the U.S. family of brands, which includes five leading omnichannel grocery brands - Food Lion, Giant Food, The GIANT Company, Hannaford and Stop & Shop. Our associates support the brands with a wide range of services, including Finance, Legal, Sustainability, Commercial, Digital and E-commerce, Technology and more.
Primary Purpose
The Lead Enterprise Architect, Engineering Excellence is a senior technology leader with a proven track record of shaping and advancing enterprise engineering strategy, architecture, and operating models to deliver measurable business value. This role defines the architectural vision, standards, guardrails, and reference patterns that enable consistent, scalable, and secure engineering practices across the enterprise. Working across product, engineering, security, operations, and in close partnership with the DevSecOps team, the Lead Architect aligns cross-domain roadmaps and strategic technology direction to strengthen developer productivity, platform enablement, and delivery effectiveness.
As the Enterprise Architecture Lead for Engineering Excellence, this role drives the adoption of modern engineering capabilities by influencing technical direction, promoting technical excellence, and establishing the structures that support long-term capability maturity. Through Communities of Practice, cross-cutting ONETech expert teams, and Centers of Excellence, the role fosters the adoption of best practices, guides capability uplift across delivery teams, and ensures architectural direction is grounded in operational realities. In doing so, the Lead Architect strengthens enterprise engineering capability, improves consistency and governance, and enables sustainable value realization at scale.
Our flexible/hybrid work schedule includes 3 in-person days at one of our core locations and 2 remote days. Our core office locations are Salisbury, NC; Chicago, IL; Quincy, MA.
Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis.
Duties and Responsibilities

• Aligns enterprise technology strategy and roadmaps to business objectives and multi-year funding plans.
• Defines enterprise blueprints that synthesize business, information, application, integration, infrastructure, and security viewpoints.
• Establishes architecture principles, reference architectures, technology standards, and rationalization guidelines.
• Chairs enterprise design authority/governance to guide decisions on scope, quality, risk, and total cost of ownership.
• Measures the value of enterprise architecture services; reports outcomes, adoption, and technical debt trends.
• Advises executives on industry trends and emerging technologies; shapes build/buy/retire decisions.
• Mentors principal/solution/domain architects; raises architecture maturity, methods, and tooling across Tech.
• Drives alignment across major transformation initiatives, ensuring architecture consistency across portfolios, domains, and strategic programs.
• Partners with product, engineering, and platform leaders to embed architecture practices into delivery, ensuring solutions adhere to enterprise standards and long-term technology strategy.
• May be called upon to support critical escalations and must be available during urgent IT incidents as needed.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent years of work experience.
• 12+ years in architecture with demonstrated leadership across complex, multi domain portfolios.
• Expertise in enterprise architecture practices (principles, standards, governance), roadmap development, and cost/value modeling.
• Exceptional communication, executive influence, and decision framing skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with architecture frameworks (e.g., TOGAF), modeling (e.g., ArchiMate/UML), and portfolio governance.
• Background spanning cloud, data, integration, security, and end user domains.

Salary Range: $160,000 - $240,000
All ADUSA job offers take multiple factors into consideration including, but not limited to salary range, internal equity, a candidate's qualifications, geographic region, job-related knowledge and skills.
This position is eligible for an incentive bonus based on company performance as provided by the plan terms and governing documents.
#LI-Hybrid #LI-CW1
At Ahold Delhaize USA, we provide services to one of the largest portfolios of grocery companies in the nation, and we're actively seeking top talent.
Our team shares a common motivation to drive change, take ownership and enable our brands to better care for their customers. We thrive on supporting great local grocery brands and their strategies.
Our associates are the heartbeat of our organization. We are committed to offering a welcoming work environment where all associates can succeed and thrive. Guided by our values of courage, care, teamwork, integrity (and even a little humor), we are dedicated to being a great place to work.
We believe in collaboration, curiosity, and continuous learning in all that we think, create and do. While building a culture where personal and professional growth are just as important as business growth, we invest in our people, empowering them to learn, grow and deliver at all levels of the business.
#BI-Hybrid