Senior Data Architect

Overview

We are seeking a Senior Data Architect to join one of our client and lead the design and delivery of modern data platforms and analytics architectures within a fast-paced, client-facing environment. You will act as the Databricks champion within the business, shaping best practice, guiding delivery teams, and supporting stakeholders through pre-sales and solution definition.

Key Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end data architecture across lakehouse, warehouse, and streaming patterns, ensuring scalability, security, and governance.
• Act as Databricks champion: define standards, reference architectures, accelerators, and reusable assets.
• Lead architectural design for Databricks (workspaces, clusters, jobs, Delta Lake, Unity Catalogue, MLflow) and integrations with cloud services.
• Partner with pre-sales teams to shape propositions, run discovery, produce high-quality proposals, and present solutions to senior client audiences (pre-sales experience is essential).
• Translate business requirements into target-state data models, ingestion patterns, and semantic layers.
• Guide engineers on implementation, performance optimisation, cost control, CI/CD, and operational readiness.
• Ensure compliance with data governance, privacy, and security controls (RBAC, encryption, auditing, lineage).

• Significant Databricks experience required, including production-scale deployments and optimisation.
• Strong hands-on capability with Spark/SQL, Delta Lake, orchestration, and data engineering patterns.
• Extensive experience designing cloud data platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and integrating with enterprise systems.
• Proven stakeholder management and ability to communicate architecture to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience with data modelling (dimensional, Data Vault, and/or domain-oriented approaches) and metadata management.
• Working knowledge of DevOps practices, infrastructure as code, and automated testing for data pipelines.

• Databricks Certifications highly desired (eg, Data Engineer, Data Analyst, Machine Learning, or Architect).
• Experience delivering governance frameworks, catalogue implementations, and operating models.
• Exposure to MLOps and analytics enablement.