Lead Data Architect

Job Title: Lead Data Architect

Location: Hybrid / Remote (UK-based)

Occasional travel may be required for workshops, stakeholder meetings and collaborative sessions.

Job Type: 7 months (Outside IR35)

Role Overview

Akoni Technologies is hiring an experienced Lead Data Architect / Federated Data Architect to support the delivery of a national cultural heritage research infrastructure programme. The role will focus on designing and implementing federated data access models, semantic interoperability frameworks and cross-institution data integration approaches for a technically operational research infrastructure demonstrator.

The successful candidate will work closely with architects, researchers, cultural heritage institutions, infrastructure teams and programme stakeholders to develop scalable and reusable data architecture patterns supporting discovery, interoperability and AI-enabled research workflows across distributed collections.

This role is heavily data-focused and requires strong experience in large-scale data integration, semantic technologies, metadata interoperability and federated architecture design.

Key Responsibilities

• Define the federated data architecture for the infrastructure prototype
• Design distributed data access and interoperability models across multiple organisations
• Develop semantic integration and linked data approaches
• Lead data modelling, metadata mapping and entity reconciliation activities
• Define API and data exchange standards for cross-institution interoperability
• Support development of semantic and knowledge graph services
• Design scalable data governance and access control models
• Work closely with EPCC/EIDF infrastructure teams on data integration requirements
• Support AI-readiness assessments and computational research workflows
• Define data quality, lineage and interoperability validation approaches
• Produce technical documentation, architecture diagrams and data standards guidance
• Support testing, benchmarking and scalability analysis activities
• Engage with GLAM institutions to understand collections, metadata standards and workflow requirements
• Contribute to governance, sustainability and operational readiness recommendations

Required Experience

• Strong experience as a Data Architect, Integration Architect or Enterprise Data Architect
• Experience delivering federated or distributed data platforms
• Strong understanding of API-led data integration and interoperability patterns
• Experience with semantic technologies, linked data or knowledge graph solutions
• Experience integrating data across multiple organisations and systems
• Strong understanding of metadata standards and data governance
• Experience with cloud-based data platforms and hybrid infrastructure
• Experience designing scalable and secure data architectures
• Strong stakeholder engagement and workshop facilitation skills
• Experience producing technical architecture and data governance documentation

Desirable Experience

• Experience within the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums)
• Knowledge of RDF, OWL, SPARQL, graph databases or semantic web technologies
• Experience with research data infrastructure or Trusted Research Environments (TREs)
• Understanding of AI-enabled research workflows and data preparation
• Experience working with cultural heritage datasets and collections management systems
• Experience working within public sector or research environments

Technical Skills

• Enterprise data architecture
• Federated and distributed data design
• API and interoperability frameworks
• Semantic data modelling and linked data
• Knowledge graphs and graph databases
• Metadata modelling and data mapping
• Cloud and hybrid data infrastructure
• Authentication and access control approaches
• Data governance and lineage management
• SQL, NoSQL and graph technologies
• Documentation and architecture modelling tools