Lead Enterprise Architect

The Enterprise Architecture Lead is a senior technical leader within Merkle’s Digital Product Engineering (DPE) practice, part of the broader Digital Experience (DX) organization. DPE serves as Merkle’s rapid innovation engine and cross-capability orchestrator, delivering bespoke product development, composable modernization, and AI-powered solutions for Fortune 100 clients. 

This role combines deep enterprise architecture expertise with a product engineering mindset. The candidate must be equally comfortable governing complex, multi-platform delivery programs and shaping what gets built and why, leading multi-disciplinary engineering teams through the practical development and delivery of production-grade solutions. 

The Enterprise Architecture Lead operates in close partnership with DPE’s Technology Lead, who owns the agentic AI and emerging technology workstream on the account. Together, they form a complementary architecture leadership pair: one focused on the foundational platform ecosystem, integration architecture, and delivery governance; the other on next-generation AI capabilities and innovation. This collaboration model ensures the client receives both operational stability and forward-looking technical vision from a unified DPE team. 

Position Requirements & Scope 

This position is aligned with Merkle’s Digital Product Engineering practice, which focuses on building and delivering complex, scalable digital products and platforms for enterprise clients. The position will be focused on one of our top-tier client accounts, a global communications services provider and technology company that represents a significant growth opportunity within DPE’s portfolio. 

Specifically, this position will be responsible for owning the enterprise architecture layer across the engagement, ensuring platform integrity and delivery rigor as the client’s strategic roadmap progresses. 

This is a long-term, strategic leadership role on the account, requiring sophisticated solution positioning, innovative integrations including AI, and capability progression against a strategic roadmap. 

Critical Role Requirements 

This is a senior, embedded position on a dedicated client team, filling a specialized enterprise architecture capability within DPE’s delivery model. The Enterprise Architecture Lead is responsible for translating an approved strategic roadmap into shipped, scalable solutions - ensuring architectural coherence, platform interoperability, and execution discipline across every workstream. This role is essential for: 

• Architectural Governance & Delivery Oversight - Owning the end-to-end technical architecture across the engagement, ensuring all solution components align to the approved roadmap, adhere to enterprise standards, and are delivered with the quality and rigor expected of a world-class digital product engineering organization. 

• Multi-Platform Solution Architecture - Designing and governing integrated, enterprise-class solutions anchored in the Adobe ecosystem (AEM, AEP, Target, Analytics, Workfront) while orchestrating adjacent platforms (Salesforce Clouds, middleware, data infrastructure, and enterprise integration layers) into a unified, cohesive architecture. This includes defining clear architectural boundaries and integration contracts with the agentic AI workstream. 

• Web & Digital Experience Delivery - Leading the initial phase of work focused on uplifting the client’s most critical digital properties, using Adobe Experience Manager as the foundational platform while ensuring the architecture is composable enough to support future modernization and AI-powered enhancement. 

• Enterprise Integration Architecture - Designing scalable integration patterns across platforms, APIs, data layers, and middleware to ensure seamless data flow, system interoperability, and operational resilience across a complex, global technology estate. This includes defining the integration surface between traditional platform services and emerging AI/agent capabilities. 

• Delivery Excellence & Execution Discipline - Bringing the operational rigor and delivery methodology of a world-class product engineering engagement: sprint-level architecture involvement, technical debt management, dependency mapping, risk mitigation, and hands-on leadership that keeps large, multi-team programs on track. 

• Technical Leadership & Team Orchestration - Leading and mentoring multi-disciplinary delivery teams (developers, platform specialists, data engineers, QA) across workstreams, ensuring technical alignment, quality standards, and consistent architectural decision-making. 

• Client-Facing Technical Partnership - Serving as a senior technical authority with client stakeholders at the VP and C-suite level, translating complex architectural decisions into business-relevant language and building confidence in the delivery approach. Presenting a coherent technical narrative that connects platform stability with innovation velocity. 

• Innovation Within Execution - Identifying and incorporating emerging capabilities (AI-powered personalization, intelligent automation, agentic workflows) into the delivery roadmap where they add measurable value, not as theoretical exercises, but as production-ready enhancements integrated within the existing architecture. Working with DPE’s Technology Lead to evaluate where AI capabilities should be natively embedded vs. independently orchestrated. 

• Cross-Practice Orchestration - Collaborating with Merkle’s adjacent practices (Content Technology, Commerce, Experience Design, Analytics) to compose solutions where DPE provides the product engineering spine. Ensuring solution designs leverage cross-practice expertise while maintaining DPE’s architectural standards and delivery accountability. 

Business Impact & ROI 

This role is the linchpin between strategy and delivered value. Without senior enterprise architecture leadership, complex multi-platform engagements risk fragmentation, scope drift, and technical debt that erode both client outcomes and Merkle margins. 

The Enterprise Architecture Lead directly protects and grows the engagement by ensuring delivery stays on-roadmap, architecture remains sound under the pressure of real-world execution, and the client sees consistent, tangible progress. This is the role that earns the next phase of work, not through a pitch, but through proof of execution. 

Critically, this role operates in tandem with DPE’s Technology Lead on the agentic workstream, which represents the largest growth opportunity on the account. By establishing a stable, well-governed platform foundation, the Enterprise Architecture Lead creates the conditions for the agentic workstream to deliver at pace and scale, directly supporting DPE’s revenue growth objectives. 

This hire reinforces Merkle’s credibility as a premier digital product engineering partner, demonstrating that DPE doesn’t just design solutions but builds and ships them at enterprise scale with the architectural discipline and product thinking that Fortune 100 clients expect. 

Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college/university; Master’s degree or relevant certifications (Adobe Certified Expert/Master, Salesforce certifications, TOGAF, AWS/GCP) strongly preferred 

• 15+ years of hands-on enterprise architecture and solution delivery experience, with a significant portion spent in large-scale SI or digital product engineering environments (e.g., Accenture, Deloitte Digital, Thoughtworks, or equivalent product-minded organizations) 

• Broad multi-platform fluency: Working delivery experience with adjacent enterprise platforms including Salesforce (Marketing Cloud, Data Cloud, Service Cloud), middleware/integration platforms (MuleSoft, Informatica, or equivalent), cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP), and data platforms (Snowflake or similar). The differentiator is the ability to compose these into a unified architecture rather than operate them in isolation. 

• AI literacy and integration aptitude: While not required to be an AI/ML specialist, must demonstrate a working understanding of how agentic AI, LLM-powered services, and intelligent automation integrate into enterprise architectures. Comfort collaborating with AI-focused engineering leads and defining architectural seams between traditional platform services and AI capabilities. 

• Proven track record of delivering large, complex, multi-year, global SI or product engineering engagements ($10M+ scope) from architecture through go-live, including governance of multi-team, multi-vendor delivery models 

• Demonstrated experience designing and governing enterprise integration architectures - APIs, event-driven patterns, ETL/ELT pipelines, and middleware orchestration 

• Ability to operate at the C-suite level with poise and credibility, translating technical architecture into business outcomes and building long-term trusted advisor relationships 

• Strong delivery methodology experience - fluent in Agile at scale (SAFe, Scrum of Scrums), waterfall-hybrid models, and the practical realities of governing large programs 

• Product engineering mindset: Ability to think beyond governance and into roadmap ownership, backlog strategy, and framing technical debt as a product decision rather than solely a risk register item 

• Hands-on leadership style - this role requires someone who can whiteboard an architecture and present to a CTO in the same week 

• Excellent organizational, communication, and presentation skills with exceptional attention to detail 

• Experience working within or alongside digital agency, CXM, or product engineering environments is a strong plus 

At dentsu, we believe great work happens when we’re connected. Our way of working combines flexibility with in-person collaboration to spark ideas and strengthen our teams. Employees who live within a commutable distance of one of our hub offices, currently located in Chicago, metro Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York City, are required and expected to work from the office three days per week (two days per week for employees based in Los Angeles). Dentsu may designate other Hub offices at any time. Those who live outside a commutable range may be designated as remote, depending on the role and business needs. Regardless of your work location, we expect our employees to be flexible to meet the needs of our Company and clients, which may include attendance in an office.

The annual salary range for this position is $136,000 - $219,075. Placement within the salary range is based on a variety of factors, including relevant experience, knowledge, skills, and other factors permitted by law.

Benefits available with this position include:

• Medical, vision, and dental insurance,
• Life insurance,
• Short-term and long-term disability insurance,
• 401k,
• Flexible paid time off,
• At least 15 paid holidays per year,
• Paid sick and safe leave, and
• Paid parental leave.

Dentsu also complies with applicable state and local laws regarding employee leave benefits, including, but not limited to providing time off pursuant to the Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act, in accordance with its plans and policies. For further details regarding Dentsu benefits, please visit www.dentsubenefitsplus.com.

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