Databricks Champion Architect

iO Associates; City Of London; On-site; GBP 129,000 - 221,000; Full time

Job summary

iO Associates is seeking a Databricks Champion Architect to define and govern our modern lakehouse architecture. You’ll blend solution design, hands-on technical leadership, and platform enablement on a contract basis to accelerate delivery teams and ensure production-ready engineering.

You will own end‑to‑end Databricks architecture across ingestion, transformation, governance, serving and operations, leveraging AutoLoader and Lakeflow Connect, with a focus on DLT with Expectations and Unity

Qualifications

• 2+ years of hands-on Databricks experience with modern features.
• Evidence of architecture ownership across projects.
• Two active Databricks certifications (e.g., Data Engineer, ML, GenAI Engineer).
• Unity Catalog architecture experience.
• DLT with Expectations implementation.
• Modern ingestion with AutoLoader/Lakeflow Connect.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end Databricks architecture across ingestion, transformation, governance, serving and operations.
• Architect modern ingestion using AutoLoader and Lakeflow Connect.
• Define DLT with Expectations—quality rules, quarantine and observability.
• Drive production-ready engineering—CI/CD, environments, monitoring, runbooks.
• Align with security, EA, governance, platform and delivery teams.
• Enable squads with playbooks, templates, ADRs and coaching.
• Support pre-sales and roadmap activities—HLDs, estimation and risk assessment.

Skills

Databricks

Architecture ownership

Solution design

Production-ready engineering

Tools

AutoLoader

Lakeflow Connect

Unity Catalog

DLT with Expectations

Delta Lake

Job description

We’re hiring a Databricks Champion Architect to define and govern our modern lakehouse architecture. You’ll blend solution design, hands‑on technical leadership, and platform enablement; setting patterns, accelerating delivery teams, and ensuring production‑ready engineering on a contract basis.

What you’ll do

Own end‑to‑end Databricks architecture across ingestion, transformation, governance, serving, and operations.

Architect modern ingestion using AutoLoader, Lakeflow Connect, batch/streaming/CDC.

Define DLT with Expectations—quality rules, quarantine, observability.

Drive production‑ready engineering—CI/CD, environments, monitoring, runbooks.

Align with security, EA, governance, platform and delivery teams.

Enable squads with playbooks, templates, ADRs, coaching.

Support pre‑sales and roadmap—HLDs, estimation, risks, proposals.

What you’ll bring

Minimum

2+ years recent hands‑on Databricks experience using modern features.

Clear evidence of architecture ownership.

Must Have

Two active Databricks certifications (e.g. Data Engineer, ML, GenAI Engineer).

Unity Catalog architecture experience.

DLT with Expectations implementation.

Modern ingestion with AutoLoader/Lakeflow Connect.

Ability to articulate recent Databricks feature usage.

Should Have

Strong Delta Lake performance skills—MERGE/CDC, partitioning, OPTIMIZE/ZORDER, VACUUM.

Cloud integration (Azure/AWS/GCP).

Ability to standardise and influence across teams.

Nice to Have

Lakeflow connectors, RBAC/masking, GenAI (Mosaic AI, Vector Search, RAG), Lakebase.