Principal BigQuery Architect (Contract)

Our client is undertaking a major analytics platform modernisation, consolidating very large-scale analytical datasets into Google BigQuery and enabling native BigQuery data sharing as the primary customer access model.

We are seeking a Principal BigQuery Architect to act as the technical lead and architectural authority for the programme. The role owns the BigQuery design, access model, and performance strategy, operating at a senior, decision-making level across the delivery life cycle.

This is a lead architect role, not a hands-on ingestion or pipeline-build position.

Programme Scale & Complexity

• Total data volume: ~50 TB

• Table count: ~800 analytical tables

• Row volumes: billions of rows across time-series and reference data

• Source: Object storage (Parquet)

• Target: BigQuery analytics environment optimised for external customer access

• Access model: Replacement of IAM-heavy permissioning with BigQuery native sharing

• Use cases: High-performance analytics, customer consumption, AI-ready workloads

Candidates must have demonstrable experience designing and operating BigQuery platforms at comparable scale and complexity.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and define the end-to-end BigQuery architecture

• Set standards for:

  • Analytical schema design and evolution

  • Partitioning and clustering strategies at multi-TB scale

  • Cost and performance optimisation for high-query workloads

  • Metadata, governance, and access segmentation

• Define BigQuery-native ingestion patterns (Parquet - BigQuery)

• Design and implement BigQuery native data-sharing models, including:

  • Dataset-level sharing

  • Secure views

  • Row- and column-level security

• Replace complex IAM-driven permissioning with scalable, managed BigQuery sharing

• Act as senior technical authority for architectural decisions, trade-offs, and risk management

• Review and approve technical designs and implementation approaches across the programme

Required Experience

• 10+ years in data engineering/analytics platform roles

• 5+ years hands-on BigQuery experience in production environments

• Proven experience designing large-scale BigQuery architectures (multi-TB, billions of rows)

• Strong expertise in BigQuery sharing, security, and entitlement models

• Demonstrable experience ingesting and optimising large Parquet datasets from S3/GCS

• Background working on enterprise or regulated-data platforms

• Comfortable operating as a principal-level architect within multi-team, long-running programmes

Nice to Have

• Financial-markets or time-series data experience

• Experience designing analytics platforms for external customer consumption

• Familiarity with Google Cloud best-practice architecture patterns