Data Architect

Principal Data Architect (MDM) - Inside IR35 Contract

Hybrid/Remote Working

Day Rate up to £500 p/d with some flexibility

We are seeking an experienced Data Architect to lead the design, implementation, and governance of enterprise data solutions. This role will emphasize operational data use cases — designing data flows that support day-to-day business operations, core applications, and real-time services — while also ensuring robust analytical and reporting capabilities. The ideal candidate will have to be a senior data leader with proven experience in engaging senior data / business / IT stakeholders, strong background in enterprise architecture, data strategy, and cloud technologies, with the ability to align both operational and analytical data initiatives with business objectives.

Key responsibilities

• Define and implement enterprise data architecture, ensuring alignment with both operational and analytical business needs.
• Lead domain-driven data modeling efforts across conceptual, logical, and physical layers to ensure data designs reflect business domains and processes.
• Define and oversee Master Data Management (MDM) strategies, including tool selection, vendor evaluation, implementation, and adoption across the enterprise.
• Establish and maintain reference data management frameworks and governance processes.
• Develop and execute data strategies, including future state architecture, data governance, metadata management, data privacy, reference data management, and data integration.
• Lead the design and review of data architectures for both operational platforms (APIs, event streams, transactional systems) and analytical platforms (data lakes, warehouses, reporting).
• Establish and enforce data architecture standards, principles, and best practices across operational and analytical domains.
• Drive adoption of governance frameworks, data quality practices, and remediation of technical debt.
• Collaborate with application, integration, and analytics teams to deliver end-to-end data solutions.
• Evaluate and select tools for operational integration (streaming, APIs, MDM) and analytical processing (warehouses, BI platforms).
• Design and maintain conceptual, logical, and domain models spanning both transactional and analytical data.

Skills

• Solid xperience in enterprise data architecture, data strategy, and cloud architecture and roadmap development of data transformation programme.
• Expertise in operational data use cases: real-time data processing, APIs, messaging/streaming (Kafka, Pub/Sub, MQ), MDM, and transactional data flows.
• Strong background in data modeling (conceptual, logical, physical) with a focus on domain-driven design (DDD).
• Proven ability to select, implement, and scale Master Data Management (MDM) solutions, including strategy definition, vendor assessment, and governance adoption.
• Experience establishing reference data management and data quality practices at enterprise scale.
• Knowledge of analytical data architectures: data lakes, warehouses (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery), BI/reporting, and ETL pipelines.
• Proficiency in public cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure).
• Experience with both transactional RDBMS and modern distributed/cloud-native databases.
• Familiarity with reporting and analytics tools (e.g., Tableau, Data Studio, Business Objects, Cognos, R).
• Skilled in architecture methodologies such as TOGAF

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, Computer Science, or related field (Master’s preferred).
• Professional certifications such as CDMP (DAMA), Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert, or equivalent

Experience

• Previous roles in large-scale enterprise environments.
• Experience in designing and implementing data solutions for operational resilience.
• Track record of delivering enterprise data capability models, domain-driven architectures, and MDM strategies.