Location: Bristol (Hybrid – 2 days per week in the office)
Contract Duration: 6 months
The Role
We are seeking an experienced GCP Data Architect to play a critical role in architecting and modernising cloud-native data platforms on Google Cloud Platform within a major financial services environment. The successful candidate will design scalable, secure, resilient and cost-optimised data solutions supporting high-volume, highly regulated workloads.
This role offers exposure to large-scale transformation programmes, modern engineering practices, mature data governance frameworks and advanced GCP services, with the opportunity to influence enterprise-wide data strategy.
Key Responsibilities
* Architect end-to-end data solutions using GCP services including BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, Dataproc, GCS and Composer.
* Design conceptual, logical and physical data models across complex risk, operations, analytics and regulatory domains.
* Build scalable ingestion and transformation frameworks with strong emphasis on data quality, lineage, metadata and auditability.
* Identify appropriate cloud architecture patterns for workload deployment and ensure governance standards are upheld.
* Define and enforce security best practices, IAM policies and data protection standards.
* Develop and deploy data pipelines using multiple GCP services.
* Manage data lineage and data quality aspects of data products.
* Define and implement SRE principles including SLIs, SLOs and SLAs for workloads.
* Lead cost optimisation initiatives and support FinOps optimisation for live workloads.
* Review and create FinOps dashboards to monitor cloud spend and efficiency.
* Provide architectural governance, reusable frameworks and technical oversight to engineering teams.
* Support Agile feature teams across the lab environment to optimise performance and reliability.
* Drive cloud modernisation and legacy-to-cloud migration initiatives.
* Conduct proof of concepts and evaluate emerging tools to enhance cloud data capabilities.
* Ensure compliance with regulatory, audit and enterprise data governance requirements.
* Create custom monitoring and alerting solutions using Dynatrace.
* Integrate Looker and enable reporting solutions for end-users within defined guardrails.
* Implement TDD for unit testing and DBB for functional testing.
* Strong experience architecting high-volume ingestion, transformation and analytics pipelines on GCP.
* Deep knowledge of data governance, lineage, metadata management and regulatory controls.
* Proven experience identifying appropriate architecture patterns and enforcing governance standards.
* Experience managing data lineage and quality across enterprise data platforms.
* Strong understanding of SRE principles and workload reliability engineering.
* Experience supporting FinOps optimisation and cloud cost management initiatives.
* Hands‑on experience developing and deploying data pipelines using GCP services.
* Experience implementing TDD and DBB testing approaches.
* Strong stakeholder engagement and ability to influence technical direction within cross‑functional Agile teams.
* Experience delivering cloud migration or platform modernisation programmes.
* Excellent documentation and communication skills.
* GCP Professional Data Engineer or Cloud Architect certification.
* Experience within BFSI domains such as AML, Fraud, Risk, Finance or Regulatory Reporting.
* Exposure to real‑time streaming, MLOps and advanced analytics architectures.
* Experience with observability tooling and cloud cost management frameworks.
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