Information Architect

Absa Group; Sandton; On-site; ZAR 800 000 - 1 200 000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial institution is seeking a skilled Lead Data Architect & Governance Strategist. This role involves designing and managing enterprise data domains while ensuring compliance with regulatory standards. The ideal candidate will drive data transformation and governance strategies, collaborating with stakeholders to enhance data quality and usability in complex environments.

Benefits

Hybrid flexibility

Collaborative team environment

Qualifications

• 5+ years in data modeling, MDM, or data governance within financial services.
• Experience supporting regulatory requirements (Basel, AML, KYC).

Responsibilities

• Drive design, management, and implementation of enterprise data domains.
• Perform deep data analysis to profile domain entities and uncover issues.
• Lead implementation of a tiered data product certification framework.

Skills

Data Architecture

Leadership & Strategy

Analytical

Stakeholder Influencer

Collaborative

Education

Bachelor's Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: Data Science

Bachelor's Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: Information Technology

Tools

Apache Spark

Hive

Denodo

SQL

Starburst

Trino

Job description

Empowering Africa’s tomorrow, together…one story at a time.

With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.

Job Summary

We are seeking a highly skilled Lead Data Architect & Governance Strategist to drive the design, management, and implementation of enterprise data domains and certified data products within our financial data ecosystem. The ideal candidate will have a deep understanding of data modeling, data mesh principles, and regulatory data management, combined with hands-on experience in platforms such as Apache Spark, Denodo, Hive, and Starburst/Trino.

Strong alignment to industry standards such as FIBO, BIAN, and ISO, with a focus on delivering scalable and compliant data ecosystems that enable regulatory reporting, risk management, and customer-centric innovation.

This is a strategic, hands-on role requiring both architectural vision and execution capability — ideal for someone passionate about transforming how data is organized, governed, and used in complex financial environments.

Job Description

Enterprise Data Architecture

• Design, refine, and manage conceptual, logical, and physical data models for enterprise domains including Customer, Involved Party, Risk, Identifier, and Sector of Industry to name a few.
• Establish and enforce architecture principles, design standards, and integration patterns for domain-based interoperability.
• Build and maintain reference architectures, canonical models, and blueprints for reusability and scalability.
• Drive architecture reviews, model approval processes, and change control for schema evolution and versioning.

Data Analysis & Interpretation

• Perform deep data analysis to profile domain entities and uncover issues related to data quality, lineage gaps, and semantic inconsistencies.
• Support regulatory analysis (e.g., AML, Basel 610) by validating identifiers, risk ratings, and party relationships.
• Conduct gap analysis and correlation checks across datasets (e.g., CIF/Identifier mismatches, null risk values, etc.).
• Profile data sets and perform root cause analysis for data quality issues using Spark, SQL, and profiling tools.

Template Design & Metadata Standardization

• Design and implement templates to capture standardized metadata and usage definitions across domains and systems.
• Develop data product lifecycle templates, approval workflows, and ownership assignment guidelines.
• Ensure consistent capture of business definitions, attribute lineage, source mappings, calculation rules, and data classification (e.g., PII, Confidential).
• Work with data owners and stewards to roll out and embed templates in key processes such as onboarding, product certification, and regulatory data preparation.
• Promote data mesh principles, enabling federated ownership and discoverable, reusable data products.

Define Enterprise Data Domain and Data Product

• Assist to define enterprise Data operating model to facilitate the targeted federated domain objectives outlined in the data strategy.
• Key contributions to developing frameworks, accelerators, handbooks and templates to identify, build, manage and govern data domains and data products.
• Define Data Domain and Data Product management framework.
• Define Data Domain and Data Product Governance and Standards – contribute to group data policies.
• Define definitions, standards, frameworks and methodologies to support data ontology modelling and data modelling.

Change management, Socialisation and embedment of Federated Domain Strategy

• Mentor stakeholders on data domain strategies and support organizational data literacy.
• Socialise and drive embedment of federated domain objectives, methodologies and processes.
• Present findings and recommendations to senior management and data practiotioners across the enterprise.
• Facilitate sessions with business units to scope projects where the CAO IA team will partner with or provide advisory assistance on shaping key Absa use cases.
• Take senior lead on business use case partnerships providing consultation, hands-on domain and data product development and information architecture design.

Domain Architecture & Modeling

• Define and maintain conceptual, logical, and physical data models for core financial domains including Customer, Involved Party, Risk, and Identifier.
• Applied semantic modeling techniques aligned with FIBO and ISO 11179 to ensure consistent metadata, glossary alignment, and data stewardship.
• Employ domain driven design frameworks to Identify domain and subdomain boundaries and design federated ownership models.
• Built domain and subdomain hierarchies to support federated governance models and domain ownership clarity.

Physical Data Design & Optimization

• Oversee the physical implementation of models in Spark, Hive, Denodo, and cloud platforms.
• Guide schema deployment, partitioning, indexing, and query tuning for performance optimization at scale.
• Support DevOps and CI/CD pipelines for schema and metadata changes.

Data Security and Privacy Architecture

• Design and embed privacy-by-design into data models, including role-based access (RBAC/PBAC), data masking, and encryption strategies.
• Classify and tag PII, PCI, and regulatory-sensitive data across the ecosystem.
• Partner with Security, Risk, and Compliance to ensure POPIA, GDPR, and internal policy adherence.

Data Lineage & Traceability

• Define lineage capture standards and implement end-to-end traceability from source to consumption.
• Work with cataloging and metadata platforms to automate lineage ingestion and visualization.
• Support audit and compliance teams with accessible data flow documentation.

Data Product Governance

• Lead the implementation of a tiered data product certification framework (Bronze/Silver/Gold).
• Define and enforce standards for metadata, glossary, quality checks, data contracts, and lifecycle workflows.
• Work with business units to develop reusable, trusted, and compliant data products.
• Developed templates and capability matrices to assess tooling maturity and support data product certification workflows.
• Led roadmap creation for platforms (e.g., Starburst, Trino) to evolve toward domain-centric and product-driven data mesh capabilities.

Data Engineering & Transformation

• Build and optimize large-scale data transformation pipelines using Apache Spark (Scala or PySpark).
• Apply advanced filtering, validation (e.g., regex), and aggregation logic using Spark SQL and window functions.
• Ensure consistency and integrity across systems using Denodo, Hive, and JDBC-accessed data layers.
• Integrated Kerberos-authenticated JDBC connections and optimized Hive/Denodo VQL queries for downstream consumption.

Regulatory Data Compliance

• Support AML/KYC, Basel 610, and other compliance use cases through accurate identifier and risk data integration.
• Ensure regulatory requirements are met through rigorous data quality and lineage tracking.
• Modeled risk-related attributes and scoring structures for integration into master data layers.
• Developed queries and views for linking domain data to risk values, ensuring referential and temporal integrity.

Tooling & Enablement

• Contribute to deriving and evolving the CAO Data Reference Architecture to support data domain and data product development, governance, management.
• Assist CAO solution architecture to evaluate and design the semantic Information architecture to support data domain and data product modelling, build and management.
• Assist CAO CPS to develop fit for purpose data curation tools that enable domain build, management and governance.
• Assist CAO Solution architecture with understanding tooling and platform integration to enable a seamless domain/ data product curation experience for users.
• Evaluate, benchmark and POC tools that will enable the IA goals and objectives – provide detailed write-ups and advise the enterprise data practitioners on industry aligned recommendations.
• Evaluate and advise on governance tooling such as Starburst, Trino, Ataccama, or internal metadata platforms.
• Prototype domain governance consoles and lifecycle management UIs using tools like Figma or React.
• Mentor stakeholders on data domain strategies and support organizational data literacy.
• Designed visual and clickable UI prototypes in Figma for domain and product governance consoles.
• Explored lightweight frontend app builds using React + Tailwind and worked with tools like Zeppelin, Denodo, DBeaver, and Vite.
• Facilitated internal adoption of governance workflows using storytelling (e.g., soccer team analogy, swimlane diagrams, journey maps).

Required Skills & Experience:

• Data Architecture: 5+ years in data modeling, MDM, or data governance within financial services
• Technology Stack: Apache Spark, Scala, Hive, Denodo, Zeppelin, DBeaver, SQL
• Tooling Proficiency: Data catalog/governance platforms (e.g., Ataccama, Collibra, Alation), Starburst/Trino
• Modeling Standards: Familiarity with FIBO, BIAN, ISO 11179, and related ontologies
• Compliance Awareness: Experience supporting regulatory requirements (Basel, AML, KYC)
• Leadership & Strategy: Strong communicator; capable of leading enterprise data domain rollouts
• Soft Skills: Analytical, structured thinker, stakeholder influencer, collaborative
• STTM & Metadata: Experience designing and managing reusable documentation templates
• Lineage & Integration: Hands-on experience with data lineage capture and model interoperability
• Security & Compliance: Familiarity with POPIA, GDPR, data masking, RBAC, and tagging
• Cloud & DevOps (Optional): AWS Glue, S3, Azure Synapse, dbt, CI/CD pipelines for schema evolution

Why Join Us?

• Be a key driver of data transformation in a major financial institution.
• Influence enterprise-wide data strategies and governance frameworks.
• Work on cutting-edge architecture aligned with global financial standards.
• Work on implementation of new industry technology and data principles.
• Hybrid flexibility and a highly collaborative, future-facing team.

Education

Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: Data Science, Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: Information Technology

Absa Bank Limited is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. In compliance with the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups whose appointments will contribute towards achievement of equitable demographic representation of our workforce profile and add to the diversity of the Bank.

Absa Bank Limited reserves the right not to make an appointment to the post as advertised