Sr Enterprise Architect – Majid Al Futtaim

MAF Global Solutions is the technology arm supporting Majid Al Futtaim’s operations across the UAE and wider region, and a Senior Enterprise Architect in this team shapes the technology strategy and architecture that underpins the group’s diverse businesses, from retail and shopping malls to entertainment and communities. This is a senior technical leadership role focused on long-term architecture decisions rather than day-to-day development.

The work involves defining enterprise architecture standards and roadmaps across business units, evaluating major technology investments for strategic and architectural fit, and working closely with both business leadership and technical teams to make sure technology decisions support the group’s broader commercial strategy rather than existing in isolation. A Senior Enterprise Architect typically also plays a governance role, reviewing major projects for architectural soundness and consistency with the group’s technology principles before significant investment is committed.

Because Majid Al Futtaim spans multiple, quite different business lines, this role requires the ability to design architecture that’s coherent at a group level while flexible enough to serve very different operational needs, retail point-of-sale systems look nothing like entertainment venue systems, which look nothing like real estate management platforms. Strong communication skills matter as much as technical depth, since much of the role involves influencing senior stakeholders who may not have a technical background.

This suits an experienced enterprise or solutions architect who has operated at a group or portfolio level before, is comfortable balancing technical rigor with business pragmatism, and enjoys shaping technology strategy rather than only implementing it.

Technology decisions made at the enterprise architecture level have a long shelf life and affect cost, flexibility, and risk across a group's entire portfolio of businesses for years after they're made, which makes this role's judgment calls unusually consequential relative to its individual scope. A Senior Enterprise Architect who designs coherent, scalable architecture standards prevents the kind of fragmented, duplicated technology investment that large diversified groups are prone to, where each business unit builds its own systems in isolation, driving up cost and creating integration headaches later. Poor architecture decisions at this level are expensive and slow to unwind: a badly chosen platform or an inconsistent data architecture can take years and significant investment to correct once business units have built on top of it. Because this role sits at the intersection of business strategy and technology, it also directly shapes whether major technology investments actually deliver the commercial outcomes leadership expects, rather than becoming expensive projects that miss their mark. Given Majid Al Futtaim's scale across retail, entertainment, and real estate, a Senior Enterprise Architect's decisions ripple across genuinely different business contexts simultaneously, meaning the quality of architectural governance here has a multiplier effect that few individual technical roles can match.

Enterprise architecture at a group level, across genuinely diverse business lines, builds a breadth of technology strategy experience that's difficult to get in a single-business-unit or single-industry technical role. Anyone who operates well in this seat develops the ability to think about technology decisions in terms of long-term cost, flexibility, and business alignment rather than just immediate technical elegance, a mindset that's highly valued in senior technology leadership roles. The stakeholder management and influencing skills built in this role are equally valuable: successfully shaping technology strategy across multiple business units requires genuine credibility with senior, often non-technical, business leaders, and that influencing skill transfers directly into CTO, CIO, or technology strategy consulting careers. Working within MAF Global Solutions also provides exposure to how a major regional conglomerate structures its technology governance and investment decisions, valuable context for anyone aiming at senior technology leadership in the region. Because enterprise architecture experience at this level is relatively scarce and in high demand, particularly across diversified, multi-business-line organizations, people who build a strong track record here are well positioned for Group CTO, Head of Enterprise Architecture, or senior technology strategy consulting roles, either within Majid Al Futtaim or at comparable large organizations across the region.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field; relevant enterprise architecture certification (e.g., TOGAF) is a strong plus
• Significant experience in enterprise or solutions architecture, ideally across multiple business units or a large, diversified organization
• Strong understanding of technology strategy, architecture governance, and IT investment evaluation
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to senior, non-technical stakeholders
• Experience working with cloud platforms, integration architecture, and enterprise systems
• Strong stakeholder management and influencing skills across business and technology functions
• Comfortable balancing technical rigor with commercial and operational pragmatism