Enterprise Architect - Data

Position Overview

A global client seeks a seasoned Enterprise Data Architect to lead comprehensive architecture design for advanced digital solutions. This position entails transforming business goals and compliance demands into secure, scalable, and resilient system architectures. The role ensures consistency across applications, data management, integration methods, cloud infrastructure, and engineering practices, harmonizing strategy with execution while upholding enterprise standards and multi-cloud governance.

Key Responsibilities

• Oversee the solution architecture lifecycle from initial discovery to deployment and operational transition, developing comprehensive architectural views including contextual, logical, physical, integration, data, security, and deployment frameworks.
• Convert business, functional, and technical requirements into defined solution architectures, development roadmaps, and transitional states.
• Architect cloud-native applications following 12-factor app principles, utilizing APIs, microservices, containerization, serverless approaches, distributed systems, resilience engineering, observability, and automated operations.
• Establish portable deployment methodologies for hybrid and multi-cloud platforms encompassing infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, secret management, release strategies, scalability, availability, and disaster-recovery protocols.
• Choose appropriate integration techniques, including synchronous APIs, event-driven messaging, streaming, orchestration, batch processing, and ETL/ELT processes; define interface contracts and operational behaviors such as latency, retry policies, idempotency, and fault handling.
• Design comprehensive data pipelines and integration architectures that manage operational stores, dimensional data models, data lakes, warehouses, and data products; supervise data modeling, transformation, lineage, metadata, quality assurance, security, and retention policies.
• Lead assessments of solution options, managing decisions around building, partnering, purchasing, reusing, and shaping solutions, considering factors like differentiation, capability, time-to-market, cost, portability, vendor lock-in, risks, and operational impacts.
• Evaluate platforms, products, vendor and partner designs through proof of concepts and measurable acceptance criteria for validation.
• Conduct design reviews to ensure compliance with enterprise architecture principles, cybersecurity, data governance, service management, and cloud guardrails; document exceptions and remediation plans.
• Provide technical guidance to cross-functional teams including software development, data, platform engineering, DevOps, security, and operations to ensure architecture integrity throughout delivery.
• Drive reduction of technical debt, eliminate duplication, and minimize excessive customization by fostering reusable services, standard architectural patterns, and governed technology selections.
• Advise senior leadership on architectural decisions, risk management, dependencies, cost, and delivery trade-offs; maintain comprehensive architecture decision logs and assurance documentation.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• Over 15 years of experience in IT with a minimum of 10 years in solution, application, data, or enterprise architecture roles focused on complex transformation projects.
• Expertise in hands-on architecture spanning software engineering, data engineering, system integration, cloud platforms, infrastructure, security protocols, and operational practices.
• Profound understanding of cloud-native and distributed system architectures, including 12-factor principles, microservices, APIs, container technologies, serverless frameworks, event-driven design, and both streaming and batch data processing.
• In-depth knowledge of integration and data management patterns, encompassing API management, messaging systems, ETL/ELT workflows, operational and dimensional modeling, data transformations, lineage tracking, metadata management, master/reference data handling, and data quality control mechanisms.
• Experience in establishing deployment and engineering standards for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, including infrastructure as code, continuous integration and delivery, testing frameworks, observability tools, reliability practices, and security by design.
• Demonstrated ability to evaluate options between building, partnering, buying, reusing, and shaping solutions; critical assessment of vendor claims, proprietary limitations, lock-in risks, commercial assumptions, and operational impact considerations.
• Practical familiarity with architecture frameworks and tools such as TOGAF, reference architectures, roadmap development, design authorities, architecture decision records, and governance models.
• Capability to balance strategic business alignment with pragmatic delivery considerations, carefully managing trade-offs among cost, speed, quality, security, resilience, portability, and maintainability.
• Excellent facilitation, leadership, and communication skills, enabling influence over development teams, vendors, and executive stakeholders.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, information systems, or a related technical field; postgraduate certifications are beneficial.
• Professional certifications including TOGAF and cloud architecture, with additional credentials in data management, integration, security, or Kubernetes considered a plus.