Data Platform Architect: Databricks & FinOps Lead (Hybrid)

HelloKindred; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 129,000 - 185,000; Full time

Job summary

HelloKindred in the United Kingdom seeks a Data Platform Architect to lead the evolution of the Enterprise Data Platform, combining architecture leadership with DevOps, FinOps, and Data Engineering. You will drive modernization with Databricks, establish governance, and optimize costs while delivering measurable business value.

Responsibilities span designing serverless Databricks capabilities, implementing cost governance, and enabling scalable analytics and ML workloads.

Qualifications

• Operate at SFIA Level 6 or above.
• Hands-on with Azure cloud services.
• Deep understanding of DevOps, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and automation frameworks.
• Proven experience architecting large-scale cloud-based data platforms.
• Strong expertise in Databricks architecture and platform administration.
• Experience implementing FinOps practices and cloud cost optimization strategies.
• Understanding of data governance, security, and compliance.
• Experience leading platform transformation and modernization programmes.
• Stakeholder management across technical and business functions.
• Expertise across Azure, Terraform, platform engineering, Databricks Serverless, cloud administration, cost management, governance, and compliance.

Responsibilities

• Lead platform modernization initiatives aligned with enterprise technology and data strategies.
• Design and implement Databricks Serverless capabilities across the platform.
• Establish governance, monitoring, and workload governance frameworks to track Serverless consumption and ROI.
• Lead enterprise-wide FinOps adoption across the EDP ecosystem.
• Define and implement a FinOps operating model and establish cost accountability across teams.
• Design tagging standards and policy controls, including automated cost governance within DevOps deployment pipelines.
• Enable user-level and project-level cost visibility, reporting, budget controls, spending guardrails, and proactive alerting.
• Architect the expansion of the EDP to support capabilities currently delivered through POSIT/RStudio.
• Design a consolidated analytics and data science platform on Databricks supporting notebook development, experimentation, MLOps, API integrations, and application deployment.
• Support external data ingestion, scheduling, BI connectivity, developer tooling, operational reporting, and AI and LLM integration patterns.
• Develop migration strategies for workloads currently hosted on POSIT.
• Define and implement platform engineering standards and self-service capabilities.
• Design IaC solutions using Terraform and cloud-native tooling.
• Implement CI/CD pipelines for platform deployments and data engineering workloads.
• Automate platform provisioning, governance, monitoring, and compliance controls.
• Integrate security and policy enforcement into DevSecOps processes.
• Establish platform observability using monitoring and logging frameworks.
• Manage platform operational overhead, reliability, performance, security, and supportability.

Skills

SFIA Level 6+

Azure cloud

Databricks architecture

FinOps

DevOps

CI/CD

Tools

Terraform

Databricks Serverless

CI/CD tooling

Cloud security tools

Job description

HelloKindred in the United Kingdom seeks a Data Platform Architect to lead the evolution of the Enterprise Data Platform, combining architecture leadership with DevOps, FinOps, and Data Engineering. You will drive modernization with Databricks, establish governance, and optimize costs while delivering measurable business value.

Responsibilities span designing serverless Databricks capabilities, implementing cost governance, and enabling scalable analytics and ML workloads.