IKEA is preparing for the future. Do you want to be part of creating it?

Architecture manager for the IKEA Planning Experience Programme (IPEX), IKEA of Sweden, Malmö

The goal of IPEX is to support and empower customers to find their personal best home furnishing solutions. We will create great planning experiences through providing activities and tools harmonized across channels to give the customer reassurance and confidence, enabling them to proceed in their buying journey and make decisions, independent of the channel or platform being used.
Our customers should experience an inspiring, fun, simple and rewarding planning journey based on their needs and preferences. Our co-workers and service partners should experience a fun, efficient and unbroken sales process.
The planning experience will be an integral part of the entire seamless buying and selling experience and a key contributor to converting visitors into happy customers and to engaging with our customers from the start. Utilizing data around and about our products to create more personalized experiences is an integral part of the work we do.

As the Architecture manager for IPEX you lead the work to further set and develop our architecture agenda as one strong component for achieving our set goals and closely aligned with overall IKEA architecture ways of working, principles and approaches.

That includes:
• To shape ideas into concrete, robust and appropriate solution architectures and transition roadmaps for implementation in close collaboration with both internal and external stakeholders
• To collaborate closely with business and IT stakeholders (including suppliers) to improve solution architecture with learnings from the implementation and industry practises.
• To support stakeholders and initiatives with Business and technical expertise.
• To secure that the solution architecture reflects the requirements from many different stakeholders in the organisation and you will actively contribute to the resolution of conflicting requirements.
• To communicate the solution architectures and transition roadmaps to relevant business and IT stakeholders within and across organisations. You will ensure understanding and alignment across the IKEA value chain.
• To follow relevant policies, principles, rules and standards. If they are not contributing to business value, you will suggest revisions.
• To pro-actively identify and advise on opportunities (such as new technology or ways of working) in order to deliver better business result
• To collaborate closely with IT suppliers, influence them with IKEA requirements and have a dialogue about proposals to secure the best result for IKEA
• To be responsible for budgeting of all connected activities
• To lead and develop the IPEX architecture team

To succeed in this role you need to have strong interest in home furnishing and people’s everyday life at home, experience and a good understanding of customer and co-worker needs in the buying and selling process. You have a substantial understanding of current and future digital technology trends, industry standards and a good understanding of architecture frameworks and modelling techniques data how they could improve customer and co-worker experiences. Experience from working with agile solution development will be of great value.

We expect you to bring all your knowledge and experience, and use that when shaping solution architectures for IKEA’s planning experiences. We do not primarily expect you to develop applications (although that can happen from time to time), but to lead and guide the solution and development teams in close collaboration with the Development manager and the IPEX Programme manager to secure that our solutions are developed to meet the needs of our customers.

You also need to be able to achieve long-term sustainable business results together with realizing short term opportunities. You are the type of person that can manage to see the big picture as well as the details and you collaborate and communicate with your stakeholders to build trust and partnership in order to reach our common goals.

You are senior with strong leadership skills and business mindset. You enjoy working in an agile and iterative, yet structured way of working and achieving results together with a team in a flexible environment, but also have a strong individual drive to deliver high quality results on time. You have great communication and networking skills and are fluent in written and spoken English.

Travelling based on project needs will be necessary.

Is this the challenge for you?
For this position we are interviewing continuously. We will close the recruitment process earlier if we have found the right candidate. So please don’t delay and submit your application as soon as possible however not later than 8 June 2018. 

 If you have any questions regarding the recruitment process, please contact Recruitment Specialist, Jonas Levin at +46 72 886 53 84.

IKEA of Sweden, or IoS, is responsible for developing the IKEA range and making it available to stores and customers all over the world. IoS is based in Älmhult – the heart of IKEA and the centre of IKEA range development and Supply chain.