Principal Data Architect

Mirai Talent; Wilmslow; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

20% bonus

35 days holiday + bank holidays

Databricks certification

Private medical

Dental

Wilmslow office base

Flexible working

Job summary

Mirai Talent in the United Kingdom is seeking a senior technical architect to own the architecture and system design behind modern data platforms for clients, from discovery through deployment, governance and handover.

This greenfield, Databricks-first role focuses on defining target architecture, key design choices and setting the technical quality bar for the engineering team, enabling scalable data products and AI-ready foundations.

Qualifications

• Experience leading architectural decisions for complex data platforms.
• Proven ability to translate requirements into target architectures and roadmaps.
• Strong data governance, quality, lineage and observability capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end architecture of client data platforms and pipelines.
• Lead technical discovery and translate requirements into architectures and roadmaps.
• Evolve Databricks reference architectures and deployment patterns.
• Design ingestion and integration patterns across ERP, CRM, APIs and files.
• Make architectural decisions across batch, incremental and streaming workloads.
• Define engineering standards across Python/PySpark, CI/CD and IaC.
• Shape data foundations for AI solutions including RAG and data products.
• Set non-functional requirements around scalability, performance, cost and security.
• Provide technical authority to ensure delivery aligns with architecture.

Skills

Technical leadership

Architecture design

Data governance

Stakeholder communication

Tools

Databricks

Delta Lake

Unity Catalog

Workflows

DLT

Lakehouse

SQL Warehouses

Terraform

CI/CD tooling

Job description

We’re partnering with a brilliant B Corp certified data consultancy as they enter their next stage of growth and appoint the most senior technical person in their business.

This is a genuine technical authority role. You’ll own the architecture and system design behind the modern data platforms they build for clients, from initial technical discovery through to deployment, governance and handover.

The work is predominantly greenfield and Databricks-first. You’ll be responsible for defining the target architecture, making the key design decisions and setting the technical quality bar the engineering team builds to.

What you’ll be doing:

• Own the end-to-end architecture of client data platforms and pipelines
• Lead technical discovery and translate requirements into target architectures and sequenced technical roadmaps
• Own and evolve Databricks reference architectures, including ingest patterns, medallion structures, domain isolation, environment topology and deployment patterns
• Design ingestion and integration patterns across ERP, CRM, APIs, SQL estates, files and CDC
• Make architectural decisions across batch, incremental and streaming workloads
• Define engineering standards across Python/PySpark, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, testing, code review and environment promotion
• Design for data quality, lineage, observability, metadata, security and governance
• Shape the data foundations and architecture required for AI solutions, including RAG, agents, vector search and data products
• Set non-functional requirements around scalability, performance, cost and security
• Provide technical authority throughout delivery, ensuring what is built stays true to the architecture

Technically, we’re looking for someone with strong experience across:

• Databricks, including Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Workflows, DLT/Lakeflow and SQL Warehouses
• Medallion lakehouse architectures
• Dimensional and data product modelling
• Ingestion and integration architecture, including CDC, APIs, incremental loading and schema drift
• Strong SQL and Python/PySpark knowledge
• CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code, ideally Terraform
• Data governance, quality, lineage and observability

Experience with Fabric, Snowflake, dbt, Azure DevOps/GitHub Actions, Purview, Atlan, Collibra, MLflow or Mosaic AI would also be valuable, but isn’t essential.

This isn’t a role where you’ll spend your days writing production pipelines. You need to be technically close enough to challenge designs and review engineering work credibly, but your value is in architecture, system-level thinking and technical judgement.

You don’t need to come from consultancy either. Strong in-house architects and platform leads are absolutely of interest. Line management is also optional, so this can remain a deeply technical architecture role.

What’s on offer:

• Up to 20% bonus
• 35 days holiday + bank holidays
• Funded Databricks certification + allocated training time
• Private medical + dental
• Wilmslow office base + flexible working

Mirai Talent is committed to creating an inclusive recruitment process. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and will happily discuss any adjustments that could make the process more accessible.