Platform Lead E2E Architect
Who we are
As the largest shared services organisation in the global telco industry with 30,000 FTE, our portfolio of next-generation solutions and services are designed in partnership with customers across Vodafone Group, local markets, and partner markets to simplify and drive growth. With our strategic partner Accenture, we work alongside our Vodafone customers, other Telco and tech companies to drive transformation, meet the challenges of our industry and ensure we stay relevant and resilient. This partnership is a unique, industry-first model which brings together the best of in-house and 3rd party capability.
We work with customers across 28 countries from 10 VOIS locations: Albania, Egypt, Hungary, India, Romania, Spain, Turkey, UK, Germany, Ireland, and with a network of teams in Czech Republic, Italy, Greece, and Portugal.
#VOIS #BeUnrivalled #CreateTheFuture
About this Role
Location: Paddington or Newbury
The Digital & IT Platform Team is responsible for designing, building, and operating the core digital and IT capabilities that underpin Vodafone’s enterprise platforms. The team provides cloud‑native engineering foundations, reusable enablers, and secure platform services that enable scalable, high‑quality delivery across multiple business initiatives and product areas. Joining Digital & IT means working at the centre of a complex, enterprise‑scale platform landscape, shaping technology that supports Vodafone’s long‑term growth and transformation.
The Value Streams Engineering Team delivers end‑to‑end digital experiences and platform capabilities through cross‑functional, product‑centric squads. Each squad is empowered to own and deliver a defined area of business value, using modern engineering practices and cloud‑native tooling. Joining this team means building robust, high‑quality digital solutions at pace, working closely with product, commercial, and technology stakeholders.
The Platform Lead Architect is a senior technical authority responsible for defining, governing, and evolving the end‑to‑end architecture of Vodafone’s enterprise Digital & IT platform. This role ensures the platform is cloud‑native, API‑first, event‑driven, secure, resilient, and scalable, enabling consistent delivery of complex digital and technology capabilities across the organisation.
Operating at the intersection of Digital & IT, Networks, Commercial, Security, and Product, the Platform Lead Architect sets the architectural direction, drives technical coherence across delivery squads, and ensures the engineering organisation delivers high‑quality, future‑ready platform capabilities aligned to Vodafone’s strategic objectives.
Given the responsibilities outlined above, the role includes:
- Providing architectural leadership and direction across multiple cross‑functional squads (typically influencing 50+ FTEs), ensuring consistent design standards, coherent technical decision‑making, and alignment across Digital & IT, Networks, Security, and Commercial.
- Shaping multi‑year platform investment decisions and influencing several million euros of annual technology spend, ensuring architectural choices maximise re‑use, scalability, cost efficiency, and long‑term sustainability of the Digital & IT platform.
- Guiding senior technical leads, architects, and engineering managers, driving capability uplift, modern engineering practices, and high‑quality delivery across enterprise‑scale platform components.
- Leading cross‑organisation governance forums and senior stakeholder engagements to resolve architectural risks, manage complex dependencies, and ensure delivery teams operate within clear architectural guardrails.
What you’ll do
- End‑to‑end ownership of the platform architecture, covering digital channels, backend services, orchestration, integration patterns, data models, network interfaces, and operational architecture.
- Define and evolve the long‑term technology strategy and architectural roadmap, aligning to business goals, multi‑market needs, and platform‑scalability requirements.
- Govern architectural standards, guardrails, and principles, ensuring consistency, reusability, and coherence across all value streams and platform teams.
- Lead high‑impact architectural decision‑making, balancing innovation with standardisation and managing trade‑offs across performance, security, cost, and delivery speed.
- Partner with Product Owners, Delivery Leads, Technical Principals, and Network Architects to ensure features are technically feasible, sequenced effectively, and built on solid architectural foundations.
- Drive platform evolution - including Identity, Product Catalogue, Charging, Billing, SIM/eSIM lifecycle management, Mediation, Observability, and Event Infrastructure.
- Champion AI‑enabled automation, architectural modernisation, and continuous simplification of technical landscapes.
- Represent Digital & IT in cross‑functional governance, senior‑level design forums, partner engagements, and roadmap planning.
- Line Management - Experience guiding senior technical professionals, fostering a high‑performance engineering and architecture culture, and providing coaching, feedback, and professional development across multi‑disciplinary teams
- Leadership - Ability to drive collaboration across organisations, align to a common goal and ensure project delivery against obstacles.
- Communication - Excellent verbal and written communication skills, capable of translating complex technical concepts into clear narratives for executives, engineers, and non‑technical stakeholders, and presenting confidently at senior forums.
- Vendor Management - Skilled in forming strategic partnerships, leading technical evaluations, and managing supplier delivery to ensure architectural alignment, cost efficiency, and platform scalability.
- Agile - Strong advocate for modern product‑centric and agile delivery models, with hands‑on experience enabling autonomous teams, refining backlogs, and embedding iterative, incremental delivery practices at scale.
Who you are
- MSc or equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Telecommunications, or related discipline.
- 10+ years of experience in architecture roles, with significant exposure to cloud, APIs, event‑driven systems, microservices, and modern DevOps/SRE practices.
- Demonstrated architectural leadership within large, multi‑squad engineering organisations.
- Track record delivering platforms integrated with telecom BSS/OSS components.
- Business‑fluent English; other European languages beneficial.