Data Platform Solution Architect

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Job description

A British multinational professional services firm is looking for a Data Platform Solution Architect to join permanently.

Job Title - Associate - Data Platform Solution Architect

Location UK - remote with access to an Office - Bristol, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Birmingham, London

The Role

You will bring creativity, technical knowledge, and architectural experience to support the design, development and implementation of new capabilities via a global Data Platform Programme that facilitates engineering and data automation. You will support the delivery of data capabilities across the organization. You will bring technical excellence and strong experience in the design and build of scalable, secure, cloud based data platforms.

You will work closely with senior colleagues in data science, data engineering, product management, software development, automation, Digital Technology Group (corporate IT) and other business groups.

Your core responsibilities and objectives in this role will be to:

• Define and deliver architecture for Data platform products and services in the cloud.
• Collaborate with Development and/or Engineering leads to support delivery and assurance of detailed design.
• Work closely with Product Owners and Product Managers to understand data platform demand/requirements.
• Provide design assurance and architecture advisory for projects consuming the data platform services.
• Deliver demand impact assessments assessing the impact of change on data platform architecture and technical road maps.
• Provide architectural and technology assurance for selection of technologies used within the platform.
• Ensure data platform architecture is designed to enable efficient operation aligned to service level targets through high availability, resilience, automation and observability.
• Apply best practice cloud security to architecture and design engaging with corporate cyber security architects and experts to embed security within platform and product design.
• Create high level design architecture documents and models to meet requirements defined by Business stakeholders typically captured by Business Analysts and in line with enterprise and platform architecture principles.
• Engage with Design Authority groups to ensure and assess strategic alignment, business value and technical risk.
• Collaborate with Services Leaders and Engineers in Digital Technology to define standards, policies and patterns where required.
• Demonstrate and support the uptake of best practices in software development, including agile methods, test-driven development, CI/CD.

Requirements and skills

Essential Skills and Knowledge:

• Significant experience of architecting cloud native data intensive platforms.
• Proven cloud native analytics/data applications architecture experience with experience of architecting for AWS including architecting solutions containing a number of the following technologies: EMR, Kenesis, Kaftka, Redshift, Sagemaker, Athena, Glue, RDS/ElasticCache/Neptune, Data Lake, Lambda, EKS, Fargate, Docker, S3.
• You will have solid experience of delivering architecture for data-intensive environments that delivers: security, performance, resilience, scalability, and reliability to meet target service level indicators for multiple audiences.
• Ability to identify architecture driven improvement opportunities to continually improve service quality and reduce costs.
• Experience of working within structured architecture design methodology (TOGAF/C4/equivalent) and delivering high level designs.
• Experience of working within agile delivery methodologies and modern development practices.
• Experience of working with product owners, product managers, scrum masters and engineers.
• Ability to explain technical concepts to a non-technical audiences.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with both non-technical and technical audiences, managing successful communications with governance boards and stakeholders.
• Experience of engaging with stakeholders, building technology trusted advisor relationships and being able to create consensus on solutions and architectures with technical audiences.
• Self-starter, pragmatic, flexible and comfortable with ambiguity, able to align business and technical vision to deliver clarity.
• Early career experience as a developer or engineer in a hands on technical role.

Desirable skills and knowledge:

• Experience of design systems that interface ITIL based service design methodologies.
• Experience of architecting data and analytic solutions on Azure.
• Azure and AWS Cloud certifications eg AWS Certified Solutions Architect.
• Knowledge of CI/CD and IaC workflows and tools and supporting others in using these.
• Experience of big data analytics frameworks (eg Spark), MLOps frameworks, message queuing frameworks (eg Kafka), and distributed databases (eg Cassandra)
• Experience in working with globally distributed teams
• Experience of working on IT for the built environment and/or building and construction engineering experience, or at least a strong interest and desire to create market leading propositions for this market.
• Experience working in a product-centric environment with human-centred design.

Reward and Benefits:

They offer a competitive salary at all levels, and one of the best benefits packages in their sector. Core benefits include cover under the UK Healthcare Plan (private medical insurance), Life Assurance, Accident Insurance, and Income Protection (long term disability) cover. Core benefits are funded by them and made available to all permanent staff in order to support and safeguard your financial, physical, and mental wellbeing. You will also have access to Choice Benefits to help with your work/life balance and financial security. In addition, all permanent employees are eligible for the Global Profit Share scheme. Subject to scheme rules employees can receive two Profit Share payments per year, which are dependent on the firm's financial performance.