Data Architect - #2157296

Data Architect – Contract (Inside IR35)

Sheffield/Birmingham (2-3 days a week)

Join a multi-year programme transforming Data Provisioning within Data Technology — building the platforms that provide a trusted source of data for operational systems and analytics across the organisation. You'll lead product architecture activities, ensuring designs align with group standards and business strategy while meeting regulatory and risk requirements.

What you'll do:

• Drive thought-leadership and execution of the Group Data Architecture strategy regionally
• Influence IT stakeholders to adopt the strategy across their designs
• Provide architectural expertise and guidance on data projects and programmes
• Facilitate design reviews to govern adherence to standards
• Manage architectural risks, issues, and governance
• Contribute to data architecture solution definition and documentation
• Lead the Data Architecture community of practice

What you'll bring:

• 5+ years as a data architect in a large, complex, geographically dispersed organisation
• Strong grasp of data architecture practices, data modeling, visualization, and pipeline design
• Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure — GCP preferred)
• Experience with data modeling tools (Visual Paradigm, Erwin, Infospear Data Architect)
• Knowledge of enterprise data classification, standardisation, and metadata management
• Experience across multiple database solutions (Postgres, Redshift, Aurora, Athena) and relational design (3NF, Dimensional Models)
• Excellent communication skills, able to translate complex concepts for varied audiences

Nice to have: NoSQL experience (HBase, BigQuery, MongoDB, Neo4j), API/microservices design, streaming engines (Kafka, Spark Streaming), data quality tooling.

Ideal for: a data architect who enjoys shaping strategy at scale while staying hands-on with modeling, pipelines, and cloud platforms.