Senior Data Architect
Overview
Our client is seeking a Senior Data Architect to lead the design and delivery of modern Microsoft data and analytics platforms within a fast-paced, client-facing environment. This role will play a key part in the clients offering, shaping best practices, guiding delivery teams, and supporting stakeholders through pre-sales engagements and solution definition activities.
The ideal candidate will have deep expertise across the Microsoft Data Platform ecosystem, including Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Services, Power BI, and enterprise data governance, with a strong track record of delivering scalable and secure analytics solutions.
Key Responsibilities
- Own end-to-end data architecture across Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, Real-Time Intelligence, Data Factory, and Power BI semantic models, ensuring scalability, security, performance, and governance.
- Act as the Microsoft Fabric subject matter expert, defining standards, reference architectures, accelerators, reusable assets, and delivery methodologies.
- Lead architectural design for Microsoft Fabric environments, including OneLake, Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, Data Factory, Dataflows Gen2, Real-Time Analytics, Power BI, and integrations with Azure services.
- Partner with pre-sales teams to shape propositions, run discovery workshops, produce high-quality proposals, and present solutions to senior client stakeholders. Pre-sales experience is essential.
- Translate business requirements into target-state architecture, data models, ingestion frameworks, semantic layers, and enterprise reporting strategies.
- Guide engineering teams on implementation best practices, performance optimisation, cost management, CI/CD, DevOps, and operational readiness across Microsoft Fabric and Azure.
- Define and implement enterprise governance frameworks leveraging Microsoft Purview, Fabric governance capabilities, lineage, RBAC, auditing, and data protection controls.
- Provide strategic guidance on modern data platform transformation, helping clients migrate from legacy data warehouses and analytics platforms to Microsoft Fabric.
Essential Requirements
- Significant experience designing and delivering Microsoft Fabric and Azure-based data platforms in enterprise environments.
- Strong hands-on expertise across Microsoft Fabric workloads, including Data Factory, Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, OneLake, Power BI, Real-Time Analytics, and Data Engineering capabilities.
- Deep understanding of modern data architecture patterns including data lakehouse, warehouse, streaming, and semantic modelling approaches.
- Extensive experience designing cloud-native data platforms using Microsoft Azure, including services such as Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure SQL, Azure Functions, Event Hubs, and Microsoft Purview.
- Proven stakeholder management skills with the ability to communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Strong experience in data modelling approaches including dimensional modelling, Data Vault, and domain-driven architectures.
- Experience with DevOps practices, Infrastructure as Code, automated deployment pipelines, source control, and testing frameworks for data platforms.
- Strong understanding of enterprise security, governance, data quality, lineage, and compliance requirements.
Desirable
- Microsoft Certifications highly desirable, including:
- Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate (DP-600)
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Engineer Associate (DP-203)
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Enterprise Data Analyst Associate (DP-500)
- Microsoft Certified: Power BI Data Analyst Associate (PL-300)
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305)
- Experience implementing enterprise governance and metadata management solutions using Microsoft Purview.
- Exposure to AI, Machine Learning, Copilot, and advanced analytics solutions within the Microsoft ecosystem.
- Experience leading cloud data modernisation and migration programmes to Microsoft Fabric.
- Pre-sales Experience within a consultancy setting