Sr Data Architect

JOB DETAILS

Role Title: Senior Data Architect

Contract Duration – 6 Months

Work mode: Hybrid | WFO 2 days a week.

Location: London

Data Hands-On Architect FULL JD

• Data Products (To-Be):

Channel Ops Warehouse (~30-day high-perf layer) and Channel Analytics Lake (7+ yrs). Expose status and statements APIs with clear SLAs.

• Platform Architecture:

S3/Glue/Athena/Iceberg lakehouse, Redshift for BI/ops. QuickSight for PO/ops dashboards. Lambda/Step Functions for stream processing orchestration.

• Streaming & Ingest:

Kafka (K4/K5/Confluent) and AWS MSK/Kinesis; connectors/CDC to DW/Lake. Partitioning, retention, replay, idempotency. EventBridge for AWS-native event routing.

• Event Contracts:

Avro/Protobuf, Schema Registry, compatibility rules, versioning strategy.

• As-Is → To-Be:

Inventory APIs/File/SWIFT feeds and stores (Aurora Postgres, Kafka). Define migration waves, cutover runbooks.

• Governance & Quality:

Data-as-a-product ownership, lineage, access controls, quality rules, retention.

• Observability & FinOps:

Grafana/Prometheus/CloudWatch for TPS, success rate, lag, spend per 1M events. Runbooks + actionable alerts.

• Scale & Resilience:

Tens of millions of payments/day, multi-AZ/region patterns, pragmatic RPO/RTO.

• Security:

Data classification, KMS encryption, tokenization where needed, least-privilege IAM, immutable audit.

• Hands-on Build:

Python/Scala/SQL; Spark/Glue; Step Functions/Lambda; IaC (Terraform); CI/CD (GitLab/Jenkins); automated tests.

Must-Have Skills:

• Streaming & EDA

Kafka (Confluent) and AWS MSK/Kinesis/Kinesis Firehose; outbox, ordering, replay, exactly/at-least-once semantics. EventBridge for event routing and filtering.

• Schema Management:

Avro/Protobuf + Schema Registry (compatibility, subject strategy, evolution).

• AWS Data Stack:

S3/Glue/Athena, Redshift, Step Functions, Lambda; Iceberg-ready lakehouse patterns. Kinesis→S3→Glue streaming pipelines; Glue Streaming; DLQ patterns.

• Payments & ISO 20022:

PAIN/PACS/CAMT, lifecycle modeling, reconciliation/advices; API/File/SWIFT channel knowledge.

• Governance:

Data-mesh mindset; ownership, quality SLAs, access, retention, lineage.

• Observability & FinOps:

Build dashboards, alerts, and cost KPIs; troubleshoot lag/throughput at scale.

• Delivery:

Production code, performance profiling, code reviews, automated tests, secure by design.

• Data Architecture Fundamentals (Must-Have):

- Logical Data Modeling

Entity-relationship diagrams, normalization (1NF through Boyce-Codd/BCNF), denormalization trade-offs; identify functional dependencies and key anomalies.

- Physical Data Modeling

Table design, partitioning strategies, indexes; SCD types; dimensional vs. transactional schemas; storage patterns for OLTP vs. analytics.

- Normalization & Design

Normalize to 3NF/BCNF for OLTP; understand when to denormalize for queries; trade-offs between 3NF, Data Vault, and star schemas.

- CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation)

Separate read/write models; event sourcing and state reconstruction; eventual consistency patterns; when CQRS is justified vs. overkill.

- Event-Driven Architecture (EDA)

Event-first design; aggregate boundaries and invariants; publish/subscribe patterns; saga orchestration; idempotency and at-least-once delivery.

- Bounded Contexts & Domain Modeling

Core/supporting/generic subdomains; context maps (anti-corruption layers, shared kernel, conformist, published language); ubiquitous language.

- Entities, Value Objects & Repositories

Domain entity identity; immutability for value objects; repository abstraction over persistence; temporal/versioned records.

- Domain Events & Contracts

Schema versioning (Avro/Protobuf); backward/forward compatibility; event replay; mapping domain events to Kafka topics and Aurora tables.

Nice-to-Have:

- QuickSight/Tableau; Redshift tuning; ksqlDB/Flink; Aurora Postgres internals.

- Edge/API constraints (Apigee/API-GW), mTLS/webhook patterns