Senior Associate, Data Architect

This is the first senior engineering hire of a deliberate platform-led transformation: moving Curinos eBenchmarkers from expert-led, manually produced benchmark reporting to a governed Databricks Lakehouse platform capable of supporting AI-first decision intelligence.

The role has a clear arc. You will first lead the migration of our benchmark production onto Databricks - owning solution design, migration execution, platform governance, and engineering standards for UK Insurance. You will then build on that foundation: turning deep domain expertise into reusable, tested data products, and going on to develop the product tooling that makes the platform strategy real. Architect first, product builder second - both matter, and the sequence is deliberate.

You will sit embedded within the UK Insurance business, reporting to the Head of Insurance, EMEA, and working directly with business leadership, product delivery, and analysts to understand the commercial purpose behind what you build. You will serve UK business priorities, working to standards set centrally by our North American Databricks platform architects - coordinating with them on enterprise governance, security, and CI/CD - while delivery ownership sits with you locally. Everything you build will meet UK regulatory requirements, including UK GDPR and data residency expectations.

Our benchmark stack shares a legacy architecture with the wider business, and the underlying platform is being upgraded in parallel; you will coordinate on the shared foundation while owning the Insurance-specific layer above it.

Responsibilities

Embedded execution, central technical governance. You will sit inside UK Insurance, working with the business lead, product delivery, business operations, analytics, and domain experts, alongside a mid-level engineering capability you will mentor. You will operate within central Engineering’s standards for architecture, code review, governance, and platform alignment, executing on those standards according to the business’s priorities. The intention is genuine ownership of the UK Insurance technical agenda, with the support and standards of a wider engineering organisation behind you.

Specific responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Lead the migration of legacy SQL solutions into Databricks Jobs, Workflows, and PySpark/SQL pipelines, maintaining operational SLAs throughout
• Define the target-state data architecture - Lakehouse, Medallion, and domain-oriented data product patterns - to support reporting, analytics, and future AI/ML use cases
• Work with product, business leadership, and analysts to codify canonical metric logic - the standard definitions for renewal, new business, pricing, and retention - replacing spreadsheet calculations with documented, testable code
• Build automated QA and reconciliation between legacy and new outputs, and the observability that gives internal and external customers confidence in the data
• Design and build production-grade, reusable pipeline frameworks with strong data quality, observability, and error handling built in
• Own UK Unity Catalog governance: catalogue, schema, table design, ownership models, and access control strategies
• Implement CI/CD pipelines for Databricks assets using source control, automated testing, and Infrastructure-as-Code where applicable
• Tune Spark and SQL workloads for performance and cost, optimising Delta Lake structures, partitioning, and computing strategy
• Partner with Security, Infrastructure, and Risk teams to design secure, least-privilege data access patterns that meet UK GDPR and regulatory requirements
• Act as the primary liaison between UK delivery and the centralised (NA-based) Databricks platform function
• Build out new product offerings on the platform, from prototype through to client implementation, using the richest market data asset in insurance
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to the mid-level engineering resource, lead architecture and code reviews, and champion engineering best practice across the team, This role is likely to suit an architect-minded senior engineer who wants to lead a migration and then stay to build the product on top of it - not hand it over and move on. It will suit a data engineer who enjoys business context and product ambiguity, a consulting-style or forward-deployed engineer who likes messy real-world delivery and tangible commercial impact, or a technical lead from a pricing, fintech, insurtech, or data-product environment.

You will enjoy this role if you like making messy things repeatable, trusted, and scalable, and you want a focused domain where your work clearly drives commercial outcomes.

This role is not a pure data science role, a BI/dashboard role, a Databricks administrator role, or a central platform role disconnected from business problems. The work is engineering-shaped but embedded in the strategic problem.

What Success Looks Like

At 6 months: the migration of at least one material product workflow is delivered onto a reusable, tested, governed foundation. QA automation is reducing manual checking, and analysts are spending less time on production and more on interpretation.

At 12 months: core recurring products sit on the Databricks platform, migration risk is materially reduced, and key metrics are version-controlled, documented, and trusted. Curinos eBenchmarkers has a credible substrate for applied AI, and the first product tooling built on the new foundation is in client hands.

Why work at Curinos?

• Competitive benefits, including a range of financial, health, and lifestyle benefits to choose from
• Flexible working options, including home working, flexible hours, and part-time options depending on role requirements
• 25 days annual leave, floating holidays, volunteering days and a day off for your birthday! Learning and development tools to support your career growth
• Work with industry-leading Subject Matter Experts and specialist products
• Regular social events and networking opportunities
• Collaborative, supportive culture, including an active DE&I program
• Employee Assistance Program providing expert third-party advice on well-being, relationships, legal, and financial matters, as well as access to counseling services

A product-minded senior engineer with the architectural depth to lead a platform migration and the temperament to work close to commercial ambiguity.

• Strong, hands-on experience with Databricks, delivering enterprise-scale pipelines, workflows, and Lakehouse architectures
• Advanced proficiency in Python, PySpark, and SQL
• A proven track record migrating SQL Server workloads, stored procedures, and scheduled jobs to modern, cloud-native data platforms
• Experience designing reusable data models, metric layers, or transformation logic
• A solid understanding of Unity Catalog governance, security models, and access control frameworks
• Experience building CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and Infrastructure-as-Code practices
• A track record of Spark performance tuning, workload optimisation, and cloud cost management
• Comfort operating in a federated model, where platform standards are set centrally but delivery ownership sits with you locally
• A track record of partnering with business stakeholders to translate commercial requirements into robust technical delivery
• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Nice to Have

• Experience within insurance, financial services, pricing, or marketing analytics
• Familiarity with UK regulatory requirements, including UK GDPR, data residency, and regional governance controls
• Experience designing reusable platform frameworks for deployment, logging, monitoring, and operational support
• Hands-on use of AI-assisted development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT, or Databricks Genie to boost engineering productivity
• Experience collaborating with centralised platforms, cloud engineering, or architecture teams across multiple regions
• Strong documentation discipline - architecture diagrams, standards, runbooks, and migration playbooks
• Dbt or analytics engineering experience

Curinos empowers financial institutions to put customers at the center of every decision. Our AI-first platform transforms proprietary data, advanced analytics and deep financial services expertise into timely recommendations - delivered right where teams work. The result: confident decisions, stronger customer relationships, and lasting, profitable growth.

Curinos operates under a hybrid modality and has office locations in New York, Chicago, Boston, Toronto, and London. This role is open to remote candidates based in the UK and able to travel as needed.

Curinos eBenchmarkers is the canonical provider of benchmark data on the decisions that govern insurer profitability - pricing, acquisition, renewal, and retention - across the UK personal lines insurance market. Our proprietary, end-to-end behavioural data cannot be replicated by any individual insurer from their own book, and it underpins trusted relationships with senior commercial decision-makers at every major UK insurer.