Data Architect

Location: Bristol (Hybrid – 2 days per week in the office)

Contract Duration: 6 months

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.

• Architect end-to-end data solutions using GCP services including Big Query, 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 Fin Ops optimisation for live workloads.
• Review and create Fin Ops 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 Fin Ops 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 with in 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.