Vitol is an energy and commodities company with revenues of $331 billion in 2024; its primary business is the trading and distribution of energy products globally – it trades over seven million barrels per day of crude oil and products and, at any time, has 250 ships transporting its cargoes.
Vitol’s clients include national oil companies, multinationals, leading industrial companies and utilities. Founded in Rotterdam in 1966, today Vitol serves clients from some 40 offices worldwide and is invested in energy assets globally including 24mM3 of storage, 850kbpd of refining capacity, and 10,000 service stations. To date, we have committed over $2.5 billion of capital to renewable projects and are identifying and developing low-carbon opportunities around the world.
Vitol is seeking an Enterprise Architect to join its technology department, reporting directly to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). This is a newly created role with accountability for defining, structuring, and governing Vitol's target architecture, technology strategy, and data architecture across our worldwide trading and physical operations.
The newly appointed Enterprise Architect will work closely with other technology teams to provide architectural counsel on platform and vendor choices, build versus buy, modernization sequencing, integration and data design, resilience and risk. Enterprise Architecture enables the company to make better-informed decisions by providing advice at the speed the decision requires.
The Enterprise Architect will have a unique opportunity to create a brand-new function of Enterprise Architecture at Vitol. This will cover aspects such as developing the function governance, architecture awareness within the technology department and supporting and promoting architecture principles defined by the CTO while supporting major key transformation programs such as our new data platform, our cloud journey, our AI transformation and application modernization.
Key areas of responsibility and oversight for the Enterprise Architect include:
• Target State & Technology Blueprint: Ownership of Vitol's enterprise technology blueprints, defining target state architectures for key business systems, platforms, and high-throughput integration layers leveraging the BDAT model.
• Architecture Governance: Establishing a lightweight, agile Architecture Advisory Framework that reviews high-risk technical decisions, core integration points, and major vendor selections without introducing corporate friction or slowing down business delivery.
• Technology & Integration Architecture: Define technology and integration based on Vitol’s main architecture principles, provide guidance and awareness within the technology teams. Identify technical debt and provide guidance on how to replace it.
• Build vs. Buy & Technical Rationalization: Defining clear decision criteria for custom software builds versus standard platform adoption, while systematically eliminating legacy technical debt, shadow IT, and redundant platform investments across business units.
• Application & Technology Inventory: Own, support and govern the application and technology landscape inventory platform, mapping each of them to owners and business capabilities.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Working closely with product engineering leads, trading desks, the Executive Technology team, CyberOps, and Cloud & Infrastructure teams.
• Team Leadership: Promote the newly created function within the company, hire, develop and retain future Enterprise Architects.
• Demand Management: Own the technology demand management process.
• Education: Undergraduate or postgraduate degree in a technical discipline.
• Leadership Experience: 7+ years of experience in enterprise architecture or technical leadership, with at least 5 years in a senior executive role.
• Architectural Governance: Proven track record of establishing lean, pragmatic architecture governance models.
• Data & Integration Topology: Hands-on expertise designing modern, event-driven architectures.
• Cloud & Modern Stack Mastery: Deep understanding of cloud-native application patterns.
• AI & Agentic: Demonstrated experience building AI and Agentic capabilities.
• Security by Design: Ensuring security and resiliency remain at the top of every architecture decision.
Soft Skills that will help you stand out:
• Pragmatic & Outcome-Oriented
• Commercial Mindset
• Decisive & Action-Oriented
• Executive Presence & Influence
• Highly Collaborative
• Operationally Excellent
What We Offer:
• Strategic Impact: reporting directly to the CTO, a clear mandate to establish and lead the Enterprise Architecture function from the ground up.
• Scale and Complexity
• Broad Technical Scope
• Flat, Meritocratic Culture
• Global Footprint
We are a leader in the energy sector with a presence across the spectrum; from oil through to power, renewables and carbon credits. Every day we use our expertise to distribute energy around the world. We source from producers, refiners and intermediaries and deliver to refineries, utilities, airlines and retail distribution networks as well as wholesalers and other traders. We manage the physical risk associated with moving energy.
Our business is global: we trade over 7 million barrels per day of crude oil and products and charter around 6,000 ship voyages a year. We also use our technical expertise to manage a global network of energy infrastructure that we deploy to help meet supply and demand flows worldwide. Our trading and logistical expertise is supported by a suite of proprietary technology applications that we build and maintain in-house.
From more than 40 offices worldwide, we seek to add value across the energy supply chain, including deploying our scale and market understanding to help facilitate the energy transition. To date, we have committed over $2 billion of capital to renewable projects and sustainable energy solutions. The focus of our business is changing, and we are always looking for new people to help build the company for the next decade and beyond.
We are a flat organisation that has a collaborative and entrepreneurial ethos. Vitol’s people are empowered to own their decisions and take responsibility for their actions. The culture is underpinned by our core values of integrity, honesty and humility. Our colleagues comprise c.1,600 people with 65+ nationalities represented, making us a truly global organisation.
For more information: www.vitol.com
Our latest ESG report can be downloaded here: https://www.vitol.com/about/esg-report/
