🚀 Contract Opportunity – Senior Data Architect (Payments / Streaming / AWS)
📍 London (Hybrid – 2 days onsite)
📆 6-Month Contract | Start: 5th Jan 2026
We are looking for a Senior Data Architect to lead the design and delivery of high-scale, event-driven data platforms within a payments and financial services environment.
This is a hands-on architecture role for someone who can design, build, and guide delivery teams across streaming, lakehouse, and governance domains.
🔧 What You’ll Be Doing
Design Channel Ops Warehouse (30-day high-performance) and long-term Analytics Lake (7+ years)
Architect AWS lakehouse platforms using S3, Glue, Athena, Iceberg, Redshift
Build and evolve Kafka-based streaming pipelines (Confluent/MSK/Kinesis)
Define event contracts using Avro/Protobuf and Schema Registry
Lead As-Is to To-Be migrations from APIs, Files, SWIFT feeds, and Aurora Postgres
Establish data-as-a-product governance, quality SLAs, lineage, and access controls
Implement observability & FinOps dashboards (TPS, lag, cost per million events)
Ensure security by design (IAM, KMS, encryption, immutable audit)
Deliver production-grade code (Python/Scala/SQL) with CI/CD and IaC
✅ Must-Have Skills
Streaming & Event-Driven Architecture
Kafka (Confluent), AWS MSK/Kinesis/Firehose
Ordering, replay, idempotency, at-least/exactly-once semantics
EventBridge for event routing
Schema Management
Avro / Protobuf, Schema Registry, versioning & compatibility
AWS Data Stack
S3, Glue, Athena, Redshift, Lambda, Step Functions
Iceberg-ready lakehouse patterns
Payments Domain
ISO 20022 (PAIN / PACS / CAMT)
Payments lifecycle, reconciliation, statements
API / File / SWIFT channels
Data Architecture Fundamentals
Logical & physical data modelling (3NF/BCNF)
Dimensional, Data Vault, OLTP vs Analytics
CQRS, Event Sourcing, EDA, Domain-Driven Design
Delivery Excellence
Hands-on coding, performance profiling
Terraform, GitLab/Jenkins CI/CD
Automated testing, secure-by-design delivery
⭐ Nice-to-Have
QuickSight / Tableau
Redshift performance tuning
ksqlDB / Flink
Aurora PostgreSQL internals
API Gateway, mTLS, webhook patterns