Databricks & AI Data Architecture Lead

Wolters Kluwer; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Wolters Kluwer in the United Kingdom seeks a Principal Data Architect to define and own the target data architecture and standards for a strategic data capability. You will prototype, review designs and guide complex engineering challenges, with potential leadership of a small team as the capability grows.

You will design a modern Databricks lakehouse, establish scalable medallion patterns, and implement governance, security, lineage and cost controls while collaborating with product,

Qualifications

• Significant experience as a Data Architect, Lead Data Architect, Principal Data Engineer or comparable senior technical leader.
• Advanced, hands-on Databricks experience in production environments, including lakehouse architecture, Delta Lake and governance, workflow, SQL and optimization.
• Proven ownership of modern data platforms or data products from architecture through production delivery and operation.
• Strong experience in data privacy and security, including data masking, anonymisation, tokenisation or comparable privacy-preserving patterns for sensitive data.
• Strong data-modelling expertise across conceptual, logical, physical, dimensional and canonical models.
• Experience with batch and real-time integration, including APIs, CDC, streaming or event-driven pipelines.
• A strong data-engineering or software-development foundation using Python, SQL, Scala, Java and/or Spark.
• Deep experience with Azure data services; AWS experience is advantageous.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the target data architecture, standards, reference patterns and technical roadmap for a strategic enterprise data capability.
• Design a modern Databricks lakehouse foundation that enables secure, scalable use of data across a complex product landscape.
• Establish scalable medallion patterns across Bronze, Silver and Gold layers, including ingestion, transformation, storage, serving and consumption.
• Design canonical, dimensional and semantic data models that enable consistent exchange and reuse across product domains.
• Architect secure data integration using batch, streaming, APIs, change data capture and event-driven patterns.
• Design privacy-preserving data capabilities for AI and analytical workloads.
• Design AI-ready data capabilities, including governed model-data pipelines, vector search and retrieval-augmented generation patterns where relevant.
• Create prototypes and proof-of-concepts, review technical designs and code, guide performance optimisation, and resolve complex technical issues.
• Build production-ready solutions with governance, lineage, quality, observability, security, reliability and cost control.
• Partner with product, engineering, AI, security, platform and business leaders to translate needs into architecture and delivery plans.
• Mentor data engineers and architects and promote reusable platform capabilities and engineering standards.

Skills

Data architecture leadership

Databricks lakehouse

Data governance & security

Data modelling

Batch/Streaming data integration

Python/SQL/Scala/Java/Spark

Azure data services

Tools

dbt

Kafka

Airflow

Terraform

Power BI

Tableau

Collibra

Microsoft Purview

Job description

Wolters Kluwer in the United Kingdom seeks a Principal Data Architect to define and own the target data architecture and standards for a strategic data capability. You will prototype, review designs and guide complex engineering challenges, with potential leadership of a small team as the capability grows.

You will design a modern Databricks lakehouse, establish scalable medallion patterns, and implement governance, security, lineage and cost controls while collaborating with product,