A global banking and capital-markets organization is seeking a Director of Data Architecture and Engineering to lead the evolution of a critical Market Risk data platform. The platform supports risk measurement, stress testing, sensitivities, limits, capital calculations, and regulatory reporting used by Risk, Finance, quantitative, and trading stakeholders.
This leader will define the future-state architecture, guide the transition from legacy relational and ETL technologies to a modern lakehouse platform, and establish engineering standards that can be reused across teams. The position combines strategic architecture, technical leadership, migration execution, data modeling, performance engineering, and operational accountability.
Responsibilities:
- Define the target architecture for a large-scale Market Risk data platform.
- Lead the modernization of legacy SQL Server and SSIS workloads using Databricks, Spark, and Delta Lake.
- Design clear, scalable data models for trading, positions, sensitivities, P&L, market data, risk calculations, limits, and capital.
- Establish shared frameworks for data ingestion, validation, reconciliation, orchestration, lineage, and recovery.
- Plan and govern migration sequencing, parallel processing, cutover, and legacy-system retirement.
- Improve distributed processing, storage, partitioning, SQL, and Spark performance.
- Embed data quality, pipeline health, observability, and SLA monitoring into the platform.
- Review technical designs and mentor data architects and engineers.
- Partner with Risk, Finance, Front Office, quantitative, governance, infrastructure, and support teams.
Role Requirements:
- 15 or more years of experience in data architecture, data engineering, or data-platform leadership.
- Significant experience within financial services.
- Direct knowledge of Market Risk or trading-system data.
- Production experience with Databricks, Spark, and Delta Lake.
- Strong experience with Microsoft SQL Server and SSIS.
- Experience modernizing a large legacy ETL or data-processing estate.
- Expertise in canonical, semantic, dimensional, operational, and analytical data modeling.
- Experience supporting hybrid cloud and on-premises infrastructure.
- Demonstrated success building reusable engineering frameworks.
- Strong SQL and distributed-processing performance-tuning skills.
- Ability to communicate architectural decisions to senior business and technology leaders.
Nice to Have:
- Experience with VaR, stress testing, FRTB, limits, capital, or regulatory reporting.
- Experience implementing data observability and automated lineage.
- Experience leading parallel-run reconciliation and production cutovers.
- Leadership experience within a global banking or capital-markets organization.
- Experience managing architecture standards across multiple engineering teams.
How We Work:
- Architecture decisions are tied to measurable business and operational outcomes.
- Leaders are expected to remain technically credible and engaged in detailed design discussions.
- Teams collaborate across Risk, Finance, trading, quantitative, infrastructure, and governance functions.
- Shared engineering frameworks are preferred over one-off project solutions.
- Stability, data quality, performance, and recoverability are treated as core design requirements.