Lead Data Architect
Lead Data Architect
£67,000 – £84,000 per year
Location: Leeds (with UK-wide flexibility)
Full-time | Data Specialist
About the Role
Our client, a leading digital consultancy, is seeking a Lead Data Architect to join their growing data practice. This role is central to designing, shaping and delivering user-centred data solutions that are secure, scalable and capable of unlocking valuable business insights.
Working within multi-disciplinary teams, you will define enterprise-level data architectures, implement robust governance standards, and design modern data platforms on cloud technologies. You will play a critical role in ensuring that clients can trust their data, understand their users and make informed, data-driven decisions.
This is an opportunity to influence high-impact transformation projects and contribute to a mission that brings data, design and engineering together to deliver meaningful outcomes for organisations and society.
Key Responsibilities
Architectural Leadership
• Define end-to-end data architectures that meet the needs of diverse stakeholders and align with enterprise-wide technical strategy.
• Develop and maintain architectural artefacts such as Entity Relationship Models, Data Dictionaries, ELT/ETL definitions and Data Lineage Models.
• Provide clear rationale for architectural decisions and ensure all changes follow robust approval processes.
• Set governance standards to protect design integrity and data quality across the organisation.
• Establish consistent approaches to data modelling, advocating data warehousing methods such as Kimball.
Hands-On Delivery
• Analyse and evaluate data sources for quality, completeness and structure.
• Review and interpret API documentation using industry tools (e.g. Postman).
• Reverse-engineer data models and translate findings into actionable Agile stories.
• Support engineering teams throughout implementation, ensuring architectural coherence.
• Collaborate with third-party suppliers to ensure compatibility and seamless integration.
• Support integration and reconciliation testing.
• Produce data visualisations using tools such as Power BI or Tableau.
About the Candidate
You will bring a strong blend of architectural expertise, technical skills and the ability to engage stakeholders with varying levels of data literacy.
Essential Skills & Experience
• Demonstrable experience defining and delivering enterprise data architectures.
• Deep understanding of data lake and data warehouse design, with hands-on experience in modern platforms such as Snowflake or Databricks.
• Strong experience with AWS, Azure or GCP.
• Excellent data modelling skills and proficiency in both OLTP and OLAP principles.
• Experience migrating data from on-premise systems to cloud environments.
• Ability to own and evolve ER models, data dictionaries, ETL/ELT frameworks.
• High-level SQL skills; familiarity with SQL Server and SSIS/SSRS is advantageous.
• Experience evaluating APIs and working with tools like Postman.
• Ability to present complex information in clear, accessible formats for technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Highly Desirable
• Previous consultancy experience.
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing data pipelines.
Salary & Benefits
• £67,000–£84,000 annual salary
• Contributory pension scheme
• 25 days annual leave plus public holidays
• Life assurance and critical illness cover
• Volunteer days
• Cycle-to-work and electric vehicle salary sacrifice schemes
• Season ticket loans
• Extensive wellbeing and discount benefits
• Flexible benefits scheme including:
– private medical and dental insurance
– increased pension contributions
– additional holidays
– wellbeing and lifestyle contributions
– charitable giving
– environmental initiatives such as tree planting
• Relocation support available (up to £8k)
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
Our client is committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive and equitable working environment. They warmly encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds, including women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, neurodivergent people, and those with disabilities.
They offer adjustments and support throughout the recruitment process to ensure accessibility and fairness for all applicants.