Data Platform Architect - 12-Month Contract - London(Hybrid) - Inside IR35

We’re recruiting for a Data Platform Architect to lead the architecture, governance, and adoption of an enterprise Databricks platform for a leading financial services organisation - acting as the organisation’s Databricks champion, defining platform standards, advising delivery teams, resolving complex architectural decisions, and ensuring secure, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective use of Databricks., * Define and maintain the enterprise Databricks reference architecture, platform principles, and engineering guardrails

• Establish decision frameworks for selecting serverless compute, job clusters, interactive compute, and SQL warehouses based on workload, security, performance, and cost
• Design and govern Unity Catalog structures, including catalogs, schemas, workspaces, storage credentials, and data access patterns
• Implement enterprise entitlement solutions covering identity federation, groups, roles, service principals, and least-privilege data access
• Define cluster policies, serverless usage policies, tagging standards, budget controls, and chargeback/showback mechanisms
• Establish reusable patterns for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, CI/CD, observability, and data quality
• Guide workload migration from Legacy platforms to Databricks-native and serverless patterns
• Review solution designs, identify platform risks, approve exceptions, and support resolution of performance/scalability/security issues
• Monitor platform adoption, utilisation, performance, and cost, driving continuous optimisation
• Evaluate new Databricks capabilities and translate them into approved enterprise patterns

• 10-20 years’ strong hands-on experience architecting and operating enterprise Databricks platforms
• Deep understanding of Databricks compute options, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, Lakeflow, Workflows, and SQL Warehouses
• Experience designing identity, entitlement, RBAC, data security, secrets management, network connectivity, and audit solutions
• Experience with cluster policies, platform automation, CI/CD, monitoring, cost governance, and performance optimisation
• Ability to convert platform capabilities into pragmatic standards and workload-selection decision frameworks
• Strong stakeholder management, technical leadership, mentoring, and architecture governance skills
• Knowledge of AWS cloud infrastructure, including IAM, private connectivity, networking, storage, encryption, secrets management, and IaC
• Ability to translate business strategy into pragmatic architecture and executable delivery plans
• Experience leading POCs, technology evaluations, and executive-level presentations
• Proven ability to lead multidisciplinary teams
• Databricks Solutions Architect or Professional Data Engineer certification, progressing to Databricks Champion (preferred)
• Experience establishing or supporting a Databricks Centre of Excellence (desirable)
• Working knowledge of Terraform, Databricks Asset Bundles, AWS CodePipeline/CodeBuild, GitHub Actions, Python, SQL, Spark, and REST APIs (desirable)
• Exposure to Real Time data processing, event-driven architectures, Power BI/Tableau, and AI/ML workloads on Databricks (desirable)
• Primary technologies: Databricks, PySpark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Delta Live Tables, SQL, Azure, Git, CI/CD, data modelling