Senior Information Architect — AI‑Driven Data & Ontology

079 NT Management Services Limited; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Northern Trust invites applications for a Senior Information Architect to shape the enterprise data strategy, governing data models across conceptual, logical, and physical layers on Snowflake and Databricks. You will guide semantic modeling, data contracts, and AI-enabled data products while aligning with security and regulatory standards.

You will mentor teams, collaborate with engineering and risk stakeholders, and drive data mesh governance to ensure scalable, high‑quality data solutions

Qualifications

• Proven experience in data architecture, data engineering, or information management.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Science, Engineering, or a related discipline.
• Proven enterprise data modelling experience at conceptual, logical, and physical levels.
• Hands-on SqlDBM experience (or equivalent modern toolset).
• Proven experience with dbt Labs.
• Good Python skills, API integration, automation.
• Practical Snowflake and Databricks experience including Cortex AI and Genie.
• Working knowledge of OWL, RDF, SPARQL and enterprise ontology design.
• Experience with at least one agentic AI framework.
• GitHub Copilot or equivalent AI coding assistant experience in a professional setting.

Responsibilities

• Data Modelling & Architecture Lead and contribute with conceptual, logical, and physical data model design aligned to the firm's data mesh and medallion architectures.
• Govern and maintain the enterprise data model library in SqlDBM, enforcing naming conventions, domain standards, and versioning.
• Define and steward canonical data entities and lineage across source, integration, and consumption layers.
• Help with the translation of business requirements into rigorous data structures in collaboration with engineering and domain teams.
• Guide teams on the design and effective use of semantic data models, including their application to agentic AI solutions.
• Semantic & Knowledge Modelling: Integrate semantic layers with business glossaries, data catalogues, and lineage tooling.
• Design and maintain semantic models to support agentic‑AI capabilities.
• Help develop ontologies, taxonomies, and controlled vocabularies underpinning enterprise metadata and search.
• Define semantic modelling standards and patterns to ensure consistent meaning, interoperability, and AI readiness across data products.
• Guide and control the creation of data domains that align with the banks underlying capabilities.
• Data Engineering & Platforms: Design data product schemas across Snowflake and Databricks, including Delta Lake structures and access patterns.
• Define and enforce architectural guardrails for data product design, including performance, scalability, security, and cost efficiency.
• Set design standards and review transformation/pipelines for compliance.
• Embed data contract standards and data quality frameworks across pipeline outputs.
• Agentic AI & AI-Assisted Development: Leverage Snowflake Cortex / Databricks Genie (or similar) to help engineering teams deliver natural language query and LLM‑augmented data products.
• Utilize GitHub Copilot (or similar) to accelerate modelling, documentation, and pipeline development.
• Design and define a set of agentic skills that can be provided to implementation teams.
• Contribute to the firm's AI Champion network, evaluating emerging capabilities and advising on adoption.
• Enterprise Architecture & Design Assurance: Act as a design authority for data architecture across teams and data domains.
• Partner with enterprise, security, and risk architecture to ensure data solutions align with broader technology and regulatory standards.
• Provide early-stage architectural input to initiative discovery and solution design to reduce delivery risk.
• Governance & Stakeholder Engagement: Present architecture decisions to senior stakeholders, architecture review boards, and regulatory audiences.
• Support regulatory compliance through robust lineage, metadata management, and data quality evidence.
• Mentor junior architects and engineers within the Information Architecture community of practice.

Skills

Data modelling

Enterprise data architecture

Python programming

API integration

Knowledge graph/ontologies

AI framework experience

GitHub Copilot usage

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related

Tools

SqlDBM

dbt Labs

Snowflake

Databricks

Snowflake Cortex / Databricks Genie

OWL / RDF / SPARQL

GitHub Copilot

Job description

Northern Trust invites applications for a Senior Information Architect to shape the enterprise data strategy, governing data models across conceptual, logical, and physical layers on Snowflake and Databricks. You will guide semantic modeling, data contracts, and AI-enabled data products while aligning with security and regulatory standards.

You will mentor teams, collaborate with engineering and risk stakeholders, and drive data mesh governance to ensure scalable, high‑quality data solutions