Senior Data Architect

Contract Data Architect – Financial Services

Location: London (3 days onsite / 2 days WFH)

Rate: £800 per day (Inside IR35)

Duration: 12-month contract

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Data Architect to support a major financial services programme focused on modernising data platforms and enabling real-time, data-driven decision making. You’ll play a key role in designing scalable, cloud-native data architectures and guiding engineering teams on best practices.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement enterprise data architecture for large-scale, cloud-native platforms
• Architect real-time and batch data pipelines using modern streaming technologies
• Define and govern data models, standards, and best practices across the organisation
• Work closely with engineering, product, and business teams to translate requirements into robust data solutions
• Support migration and optimisation of data workloads to AWS
• Ensure data platforms meet security, governance, and regulatory requirements within financial services
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring to data engineers and developers

Essential Skills & Experience

• Proven experience as a Data Architect within financial services (banking, insurance, asset management, fintech, etc.)
• Strong expertise with:
• AWS data services (e.g., S3, Glue, Lambda, Redshift, EMR, Kinesis or similar)
• Apache Kafka and event-driven / streaming architectures
• JSON and modern data interchange formats
• Deep understanding of unstructured and semi-structured data (logs, documents, streaming events, etc.)
• Experience designing data lakes, lakehouses, and modern data platforms
• Strong knowledge of data governance, security, and regulatory compliance
• Excellent stakeholder communication and documentation skills

Desirable Experience

• Experience with data mesh or domain-driven architecture approaches
• Knowledge of CI/CD and infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.)
• Exposure to advanced analytics, AI/ML data pipelines, or real-time reporting

Contract Details

• Start: ASAP
• Length: 12 months
• Rate: £800 per day (Inside IR35)
• Location: London hybrid (3 days onsite / 2 WFH)