Platform Architect

Role: Senior Data Platform Architect (Contract)

Duration: 6 months+

IR35: Inside

Start: January

Location: Remote (occasional on-site as required)

Overview

A large organisation is maturing its modern cloud-based data platform built on Snowflake and Azure. They have strong leadership, product ownership, and capable data engineering teams but require a hands-on senior specialist to define and implement key elements of the target platform architecture.

This role is execution-focused - ideal for a senior individual contributor with deep technical expertise who can accelerate delivery, improve platform engineering standards, and guide teams from within.

Key Responsibilities

• Define, refine, and implement the target technical architecture across Snowflake, Azure, and associated integration layers.
• Lead hands-on engineering across IaC, CI/CD, platform automation, access control, and metadata/lineage implementation.
• Integrate the data platform with broader application and cloud services, ensuring secure, scalable, and reliable data movement.
• Improve platform performance, cost efficiency, monitoring, and operational resilience.
• Translate requirements from product owners and technical stakeholders into scalable solution designs.
• Support the onboarding of additional data domains, workloads, and analytical use cases.
• Troubleshoot platform-wide issues and design durable, long-term fixes.
• Provide technical oversight, engineering guidance, and best-practice coaching without acting as a manager or strategist.

Required Experience

• Proven experience building, scaling, and operating modern cloud-based data platforms using Snowflake and Azure.
• Strong hands-on skills in:
• Terraform (Azure + Snowflake IaC)
• CI/CD (Azure DevOps / GitHub Actions)
• Azure Data Services (ADF, Functions, Key Vault, Event Hub, etc.)
• ELT patterns and data pipeline orchestration
• Strong understanding of platform security, RBAC/ABAC, governance-enabling patterns, and data quality foundations.
• Broad experience across integration, platform automation, pipelines, metadata, observability, and cost management.
• Ability to work independently in complex environments with both legacy and modern components.
• Clear communicator who can articulate architectural decisions to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.