(Data) Architect

This position is responsible for designing, evolving, and governing the end-to-end data architecture of the Product Unit. The Data Architect establishes architectural principles, selects and shapes core data platforms, and ensures consistent implementation across teams. The role combines hands-on technical leadership with strategic decision-making, focusing on long-term platform sustainability rather than short-term delivery., * Own and evolve the target data and analytics architecture, making explicit trade-offs between scalability, cost, speed, and risk

• Act as the primary architectural authority for data platforms, providing clear direction to engineering and product teams
• Partner with Global and Enterprise Architects to align local data architecture with enterprise standards while protecting business-unit autonomy where required
• Define architectural standards, reference implementations, and guardrails for data ingestion, transformation, storage, and consumption
• Review and challenge designs, driving architectural consistency without becoming a delivery bottleneck
• Proactively identify architectural risks, technical debt, and scalability limits, and drive remediation plans
• Evaluate emerging data and AI technologies and determine when and where they add real business value
• Guide teams in evolving platform components into shared infrastructure capabilities
• Monitor platform health, performance, reliability, and cost trends, and initiate corrective architectural action
• Serve as a technical mentor and force multiplier for senior engineers and technical leads

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, or data platform architecture
• Proven experience acting as architectural authority for complex, distributed data systems in production
• BS in Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent experience required; advanced degree preferred

TECHNICAL SKILLS:

• Deep expertise in distributed systems architecture, including event-driven designs, scalability strategies, fault tolerance, consistency trade-offs, and system observability
• Strong architectural ownership of data engineering platforms, covering batch and streaming pipelines, data modeling, orchestration, schema evolution, and data quality enforcement
• Hands-on architectural experience with Snowflake, Databricks, and dbt, including lakehouse design, ELT patterns, performance tuning, and cost control
• Strong programming background in C#, Python, and SQL, with the ability to design and review production-grade data services, APIs, and pipelines
• Proven experience designing cloud-native data platforms, including security, identity, networking, infrastructure-as-code, and operational resilience
• Ownership of data governance architecture, including metadata, lineage, access control, privacy, and regulatory compliance
• Experience with AI platform enablement, including agentic architectures, AI evaluation frameworks, and LLMOps, is a strong plus

Nextens is part of LexisNexis Risk Solutions within the RELX organization. In the Netherlands, LexisNexis Risk Solutions employs over 200 professionals who work on strong brands and on the continued development of the company as a provider of digital products that support and enhance our customers’ work processes.