Hotels and Restaurants - Principal Architect

Here at Whitbread, we are seeking an experienced Principal Architect to join our Hotels & Restaurants technology team to own end to end Architecture for the domain, making sure that solution designs are sustainable and aligned to both team and department strategies, whilst following Architecture Principles. As our Principal Architect, you will lead and assure architecture governance, ensuring requirements, scope changes and designs are reviewed, decisions recorded, and outcomes aligned to EA standards, policies, and guardrails. Role: Principal Architect Contract Type: Full time, Permanent Location: Whitbread Court, Dunstable (Hybrid working, 3 days per week in office) Why You’ll Love It Here Healthcare: Family BUPA healthcare 10% matched pension Discounts: Up to 60% discount on Premier Inn stays and 25% discount on our Restaurant brand Annual Incentive of up to 30% Bonus Check out all our benefits here: https://www.whitbreadcareers.com/about-us/benefits/ What you’ll be doing: As the Principal Architect, you will define and evolve our Hotels & Restaurants teams domain architecture, ensuring end-to-end alignment across products, platforms, and suppliers. Alongside this, you will own the architecture artefact set for team as well as setting and enforcing domain design principles and guardrails, govern design trade-offs and escalate cross-portfolio conflicts and exceptions through the agreed architecture governance model. You will also lead architecture governance forums, ensuring decisions, approvals, exceptions, and actions are documented, communicated, and progressed. As well as the above, you ensure solutions comply with Enterprise Architecture and Technology standards and relevant security, integration, and data policies; proactively identify non-compliance and drive remediation or formal exception management. What you’ll need: Significant proven experience owning end-to-end solution and domain architecture in complex, multi-team environments. Strong working knowledge of enterprise architecture operating models and governance (principles, standards, patterns, review/approval), with ability to lead design authority discussions. Strong understanding of integration, security, privacy, and data expectations, with ability to shape and assure non-functional requirements and manage architecture risks. Experience collaborating with senior stakeholders across different domains within a business, tailoring communication style depending on the audience. Demonstrable experience engaging vendors and partners in a multi-supplier ecosystem. Be part of our Technology Team at Whitbread Through collaboration, passion and hiring the smartest minds, our Technology team builds products and services that are used by 38,000 of us at Whitbread and millions of guests. Everything from an eCommerce website that handles £2 billion in transactions per year, applications that are scalable across our 1,200 hotel and restaurants, devices that enable our teams and guests to have a seamless experience, all whilst keeping data secure. Together we’re building the hotel of the future.