Contract Data Architect – Financial Services
Location: London (3 days onsite / 2 days WFH)
Rate: £800 per day (Inside IR35)
Duration: 12-month contract
The Role
We are seeking an experienced Data Architect to support a major financial services programme focused on modernising data platforms and enabling real-time, data-driven decision making. You'll play a key role in designing scalable, cloud-native data architectures and guiding engineering teams on best practices.
Key Responsibilities
* Design and implement enterprise data architecture for large-scale, cloud-native platforms
* Architect real-time and batch data pipelines using modern streaming technologies
* Define and govern data models, standards, and best practices across the organisation
* Work closely with engineering, product, and business teams to translate requirements into robust data solutions
* Support migration and optimisation of data workloads to AWS
* Ensure data platforms meet security, governance, and regulatory requirements within financial services
* Provide technical leadership and mentoring to data engineers and developers
Essential Skills & Experience
* Proven experience as a Data Architect within financial services (banking, insurance, asset management, fintech, etc.)
* Strong expertise with:
* AWS data services (e.g., S3, Glue, Lambda, Redshift, EMR, Kinesis or similar)
* Apache Kafka and event-driven / streaming architectures
* JSON and modern data interchange formats
* Deep understanding of unstructured and semi-structured data (logs, documents, streaming events, etc.)
* Experience designing data lakes, lakehouses, and modern data platforms
* Strong knowledge of data governance, security, and regulatory compliance
* Excellent stakeholder communication and documentation skills
Desirable Experience
* Experience with data mesh or domain-driven architecture approaches
* Knowledge of CI/CD and infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.)
* Exposure to advanced analytics, AI/ML data pipelines, or real-time reporting
Contract Details
* Start: ASAP
* Length: 12 months
* Rate: £800 per day (Inside IR35)
* Location: London hybrid (3 days onsite / 2 WFH)