Databricks Champion Architect

We’re hiring a Databricks Champion Architect to define and govern our modern lakehouse architecture. You’ll blend solution design, hands-on technical leadership, and platform enablement; setting patterns, accelerating delivery teams, and ensuring production-ready engineering on a contract basis. What you’ll do

• Own end-to-end Databricks architecture across ingestion, transformation, governance, serving, and operations.
• Set Medallion Architecture standards-Bronze/Silver/Gold, SCD/CDC, data quality, retention, performance.
• Architect modern ingestion using AutoLoader, Lakeflow Connect, batch/streaming/CDC.
• Lead Unity Catalog governance-namespace strategy, access models, lineage, secure-by-design patterns.
• Define DLT with Expectations-quality rules, quarantine, observability.
• Drive production-ready engineering-CI/CD, environments, monitoring, runbooks.
• Align with security, EA, governance, platform and delivery teams.
• Enable squads with playbooks, templates, ADRs, coaching.
• Support pre-sales and roadmap-HLDs, estimation, risks, proposals.

• 2+ years recent hands-on Databricks experience using modern features.
• Clear evidence of architecture ownership.

Must Have

• Two active Databricks certifications (eg Data Engineer, ML, GenAI Engineer).
• Proven Medallion Architecture design.
• Unity Catalog architecture experience.
• DLT with Expectations implementation.
• Modern ingestion with AutoLoader/Lakeflow Connect.
• Ability to articulate recent Databricks feature usage.

Should Have

• Strong Delta Lake performance skills-MERGE/CDC, partitioning, OPTIMIZE/ZORDER, VACUUM.
• Mature production architecture-Workflows, secrets, testing, observability.
• Cloud integration (Azure/AWS/GCP).
• Ability to standardise and influence across teams.

Nice to Have

• Lakeflow connectors, RBAC/masking, GenAI (Mosaic AI, Vector Search, RAG), Lakebase.

City of London, Greater London, England - £500 - 650 per day Contract Posted by: IO Associates Posted: Thursday, 3 September 2026