Senior Data Architect – Hybrid, Cloud & Governance

Scottish Funding Council; City of Edinburgh; Hybrid; GBP 67,000 - 79,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working

Civil Service Pension

Flexible working hours

Job summary

Scottish Funding Council is seeking a Lead Data Architect to drive the data architecture strategy and standards. You will lead enterprise data modelling, governance and design assurance across platforms, enabling trusted data use to support organisational priorities.

The role requires expert communication with senior stakeholders, coaching teams, and shaping modern cloud-based data solutions within a hybrid Edinburgh work environment.

Qualifications

• Significant experience defining, implementing and evolving data architectures that support organisational strategy and business outcomes.
• Expertise in conceptual, logical and physical data modelling for enterprise and domain data models.
• Experience establishing architecture principles, governance processes and design assurance for consistent decision making.
• Strong understanding of data management and governance practices, including metadata, lineage, and master data.
• Experience designing data architectures for modern cloud platforms, preferably Azure and Fabric ecosystems.
• Experience aligning data architecture decisions with organisational strategy and transformation goals.
• Proven ability to influence decisions, build consensus, and secure adoption of standards across teams.
• Ability to explain complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to provide technical leadership through coaching and collaboration on data practice.

Responsibilities

• Act as SFCs authority for Data Architecture, providing guidance on design standards and data modelling.
• Define, maintain, and evolve data architecture aligned with priorities and strategy.
• Lead development of enterprise, domain, conceptual, logical and physical data models.
• Establish architecture principles, standards, governance, and design assurance.
• Govern data architecture, providing oversight for major data initiatives and programmes.
• Advise senior stakeholders with evidence-based recommendations and risk trade-offs.
• Build consensus across teams to apply data standards across platforms and services.
• Define approaches to improve interoperability, governance and data reuse across SFC.
• Identify and manage data architecture risks, debt, and opportunities.
• Mentor colleagues to raise data architecture capability and adoption.

Skills

Data Architecture

Data Modelling

Stakeholder Engagement

Cloud Data Platforms

Education

TOGAF / DAMA / Azure certs

Enterprise Data Management

Tools

Azure Data Factory

Databricks

Microsoft Fabric

Job description

Scottish Funding Council is seeking a Lead Data Architect to drive the data architecture strategy and standards. You will lead enterprise data modelling, governance and design assurance across platforms, enabling trusted data use to support organisational priorities.

The role requires expert communication with senior stakeholders, coaching teams, and shaping modern cloud-based data solutions within a hybrid Edinburgh work environment.