Senior Data Architecture Lead: Cloud & BigQuery

Government Digital Service; Manchester; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is seeking a Senior Technical Architect to own GOV.UK data infrastructure, delivering robust, scalable data platforms and actionable intelligence.

You will lead architectural strategy, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product teams to align data platforms with government standards, ensuring secure, resilient systems and data-driven decision making across services.

Qualifications

• Designing and assuring large-scale, resilient data architectures for complex data platforms.
• Strong understanding of modern data engineering principles and best practices.
• Ability to translate business and user requirements into secure, scalable technical solutions.
• Expert knowledge of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and BigQuery for data warehousing and analytics, plus familiarity with AWS.
• Experience with web analytics data collection using GTM and GA to support data-driven decisions.
• Excellent communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders to drive direction.
• Mentoring and supporting engineers and architects to foster excellence.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical and architectural leadership for data-intensive systems.
• Collaborate with product and delivery managers to plan and prioritise work.
• Ensure architectures align across workstreams and standards.
• Design end-to-end data infrastructure to meet expanding user needs.

Skills

Large-scale data architectures

Data engineering principles

Requirements translation

GCP BigQuery

AWS familiarity

GTM/GA data collection

Stakeholder communication

Mentoring engineers

Tools

Google Tag Manager

Google Analytics

BigQuery

Job description

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is seeking a Senior Technical Architect to own GOV.UK data infrastructure, delivering robust, scalable data platforms and actionable intelligence.

You will lead architectural strategy, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product teams to align data platforms with government standards, ensuring secure, resilient systems and data-driven decision making across services.