Data Architect

Data Architect — Insurance Transformation | Contract | Remote

Location: Remote‐first (ad hoc London / client visits as required)

Rate: up to £650/day (Outside IR35)

Length: Discovery (short‐term) progressing into 12+ month implementation

Sector: Insurance | Pensions | Data Transformation

Overview

We have an urgent requirement for a contract Data Architect to lead a data transformation for a third‐party administrator. The initial engagement is discovery into a long implementation. Strong insurance experience, ideally with bulk purchase annuities (BPA), is essential.

Role

You’ll define the target data architecture and lead the technical design from legacy mainframe/COBOL sources into a cloud lakehouse (medallion) pattern. This is a hands‐on, senior technical role collaborating with actuarial, product, engineering and platform teams to ensure the architecture supports regulatory reporting, client reporting and self‐service portals.

Key responsibilities

• Lead discovery and design of a lakehouse/medallion data architecture that ingests and refactors mainframe/COBOL datasets
• Architect microservices-based integration patterns and APIs for data movement and portal access
• Translate actuarial and scheme data requirements into robust data models and pipelines
• Define data quality, reconciliation and control frameworks to support scheme adjustments and regulatory reporting
• Design deployment and CI/CD patterns for data pipelines across Dev/UAT/Prod environments
• Produce technical artefacts: data models, ingestion patterns, security controls, runbooks and migration plans
• Work with Product, Platform and Actuarial teams to ensure operational readiness and handover to run teams

What we’re looking for

• Strong insurance or pensions experience, ideally with bulk purchase annuities / scheme data familiarity
• Deep expertise in cloud data platforms, lakehouse/medallion architectures and data engineering patterns
• Proven experience migrating mainframe/COBOL data to modern cloud platforms and integrating via microservices/APIs
• Good understanding of actuarial data models and how they impact pricing, reporting and scheme adjustments
• Hands‐on with data tooling (e.g., Databricks, Azure/AWS/GCP, Spark, SQL, Delta Lake) and CI/CD for data
• Strong stakeholder engagement skills and experience working across technical and non‐technical teams