Principal Lead Solution Architect - Customer

Principal Lead Solution Architect (Customer)

Location: Remote (UK)

Permanent

RS Group is seeking a Principal Lead Solution Architect to join our team. In this senior leadership role, you will shape technology strategy and solution design across our global e-commerce platforms. You’ll combine hands-on architecture, governance, and people management to ensure RS continues to scale, innovate, and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

You’ll work across programmes in Digital Commerce, Customer Data, and Value-Added Services, designing solutions that power our next-generation e-commerce and B2B customer platforms.

What You’ll Be Doing

Programme & Project Leadership

• Lead the architecture of RS’s global e-commerce platforms and supporting systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and an exceptional customer experience.
• Shape the design of Value-Added Services, including eProcurement and B2B quotation tools.
• Drive initiatives that integrate customer platforms, data, and services into a seamless digital ecosystem.
• Ensure architecture alignment and clear communication across business and technology teams.
• Champion technical excellence and promote the “art of the possible.”
  
  

Team Leadership & Development

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of Solution Architects.
• Support professional growth, wellbeing, and a high-performing team culture.
• Build strong partnerships with internal stakeholders, engineering teams, and leading technology providers.
  
  

Architecture Governance & Decision-Making

• Chair architecture review meetings, approving solution design documents and key decisions.
• Present cross-cutting architectural issues to the Group Architecture Board and engage senior leaders in decision-making.
• Maintain consistent architectural standards, patterns, and principles across domains.
  
  

Stakeholder Engagement

• Act as a trusted advisor to senior stakeholders across the portfolio.
• Represent technology and architecture at programme boards and governance forums.
• Translate complex technical decisions into clear business impact for executive stakeholders.
• Maintain a holistic view of company-wide technology roadmaps.
  
  

About You

You are a strategic, hands-on technology leader with a passion for delivering innovative, scalable, and robust solutions. You thrive in complex environments, can influence at all levels, and have a proven track record of building high-performing architecture teams.

What You’ll Need

• Proven experience as a Lead Solution Architect in a global or large-scale enterprise.
• Deep expertise in enterprise architecture patterns: microservices, APIs, event-driven, cloud-native.
• Hands-on knowledge of modern platforms and technologies such as:
  
• Cloud: AWS, Azure
• Customer platforms: Adobe Commerce, Informatica
• Web & Mobile: Node.js, React, responsive design
• Integration: MuleSoft, Apollo GraphQL, Kong
  
• Strong background in e-commerce and B2B platforms, with exposure to ERP, CRM, Product, Data, and Supply Chain systems.
• Knowledge of security, scalability, maintainability, usability, monitoring, and alerting.
• Expertise in architecture design, including methodologies, diagrams, analysis, and specifications.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence at executive level.
• Leadership experience in mentoring, line management, and building high-performing architecture teams.
  
  

The extras you’ll get:

At RS, as well as the usual employee benefits you’d expect from a FTSE listed company, including annual performance bonus, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, private healthcare, in the UK&I, we’ve just introduced a number of new Family Friendly Policies including:

• Help for people to take control of ongoing Health conditions such as diabetes or asthma with £500 a year available for monitoring & consultation
• Support for Neurodiverse colleagues and families with neurodiverse members with needs assessment, diagnosis and post diagnostic support for autism spectrum, ADHD and Tourette’s syndrome
• Support for Women at different life stages from streamlined fertility support through to diagnosis and monitoring of both endometriosis and menopause
• Helping our LGBTQ+ community through enhanced coverage for trans colleagues, including voice coaching, facial surgery, and gender confirmation surgery
• Additions to Fertility coverage including IVF for lesbian couples and information/support around surrogacy and adoption for all.
  
  

We are RS

At RS we’ve been solving engineering problems for over 80 years: big ones, small ones, easy and difficult ones. We turn the ‘what ifs’ into the ‘why nots’, the impossible into the possible.

Our purpose? Making amazing happen for a better world.

We offer service and product solutions. We send out a parcel every 2 seconds, to over 130 countries. We provide over 700,000 in-stock and over 3 million unstocked products to more than 1.2 million customers.

We want people like you, as you are curious about things, you like doing things differently and also in a human way with empathy. Because that’s exactly how we partner with people – our customers, suppliers, colleagues and communities – to solve problems.

We’ll also invest in your development and wellbeing – because building a more diverse and inclusive culture, being ethical, responsible, and committed to our Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) action plan is at the heart of everything we do.

Come and join us and we’ll help you to think big, do more and unleash your brilliance, so you do amazing things too.