Architect-Data Engineer

Job Summary

Role Overview. We are looking for an experienced Data Platform Solution Architect to join an existing enterprise data platform team. The role requires the ability to rapidly assimilate a complex, partially implemented platform - understanding what has been built, what remains, and what needs to evolve - and to translate that into a clear, actionable architecture that guides the team through current delivery and the next stage of platform transformation. This person will work closely with senior engineers and stakeholders, providing the architectural vision and technical direction needed to complete ongoing work and design the path forward.

Responsibilities

• Rapidly assess and develop a deep understanding of the current platform state across all layers and components, working alongside the existing engineering team.
• Define and own the target-state architecture, bridging the gap between what is currently implemented and what needs to be completed or evolved.
• Drive non-functional requirements - scalability, availability, performance, security, and resilience - into platform design.
• Design the architectural roadmap for the next stage of platform transformation, ensuring continuity with current investments while enabling future scalability.
• Translate business and data requirements into architectural decisions, reference designs, and technical standards.
• Provide hands-on architectural guidance to engineering teams on a day-to-day basis - not limited to design documents but actively engaged in delivery.
• Evaluate and select technologies, tools, and vendors, with clear trade-off analysis.
• Champion automation, self-service, and infrastructure-as-code to reduce operational friction.
• Identify architectural risks, dependencies, and trade-offs across the platform and recommend mitigation strategies.
• Define integration patterns, data flow designs, and governance standards across source ingestion, transformation, and consumption layers.
• Establish and enforce architecture principles, design patterns, and platform standards across the team.
• Collaborate with data governance, business, information security, enterprise architecture and technology stakeholders to align platform direction with enterprise requirements.
• Support migration planning by defining target architectures, transition states, and validation strategies for workload migrations across platforms.
• Drive decisions on platform tooling, infrastructure, and service selection in alignment with cloud and enterprise architecture standards.

Core Technical Skills

• Architecture & Design: Design and implement enterprise-scale data platform architectures from ingestion to consumption using Lakehouse/Medallion architecture principles.
• Strong expertise in data modelling, data governance, data quality, lineage, CDC, SCD, audit, and control frameworks.
• Experience with Unity Catalog and Azure Purview for enterprise data governance.
• Architect scalable batch and real-time data processing, ETL/ELT frameworks, migration strategies, and performance optimization.
• Hands-on experience with the Azure Data Platform, including Azure Synapse Analytics, ADLS Gen2, Delta Lake, Azure Analysis Services, Oracle GoldenGate (or equivalent), and Power BI semantic models.
• Extensive experience with Azure Databricks, including Delta Lake, Delta Live Tables, Unity Catalog, Spark, workflow orchestration, governance, and Lakehouse migration.
• Strong Azure cloud architecture expertise covering security, networking, scalability, resilience, and cost optimization.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred), CI/CD and DevOps practices using Azure DevOps/GitHub Actions, and container technologies (Docker/Kubernetes).
• Strong hands-on engineering background with advanced Python and SQL skills, capable of reviewing, optimizing, and contributing to implementation decisions.
• Define and implement operational excellence practices including environment management (DEV/UAT/PROD), monitoring & alerting, vulnerability management, and incident/problem management.
• Establish comprehensive testing frameworks, including unit testing, data reconciliation, smoke testing, and end-to-end validation for data pipelines.
• Provide technical leadership through architecture reviews, code reviews, mentoring, and implementation governance to ensure adherence to enterprise standards.
• Define agentic integration patterns to enhance data ingestion options.

Nice to Have

• Exposure to real-time and streaming architectures (Event Hub / Kafka / Kinesis).
• Familiarity with MLOps.
• Experience with monitoring and observability frameworks (e.g., Dynatrace).

Experience & Profile

• 10+ years of experience in Data Engineering and/or Data Architecture, with at least 4-5 years in a solution or platform architect role.
• Proven experience joining mid-flight programs - able to quickly understand existing implementations and make sound architectural decisions without starting from a blank slate.
• Track record of delivering architecture across complex, multi-layer data platforms in enterprise environments.
• Strong ability to balance pragmatism with rigor - delivering architecture that works for the team today while keeping the longer-term direction sound.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills - able to present technical architecture clearly to both engineering teams and non-technical stakeholders.
• Collaborative by nature - this is a working architect role embedded with the team, not a remote advisory position.
• Experience working in regulated or enterprise-scale environments.