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# Databricks Champion Architect

- **Company:** iO Associates
- **Location:** London, UK
- **Experience:** Experienced
- **Salary:** £130,000.0 - £169,000.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Artificial Intelligence, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Continuous Integration, Software Design Patterns, Role-Based Access Control, Search Technologies, Data Lakes, Cloud Integration, Databricks
- **Published:** September 4, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.careerboard.com/pt/en/find-jobs-in-United-Kingdom/-F39D73F13BD9EEB332/

## About the Role

* 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.

## Description

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.


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