Job Title: Data Architect Location: Birmingham/Sheffield/Edinburgh (3 days per week in the office) Salary/Rate: Up to £431 per day INSIDE IR35 Start Date: 06/05/2025 Job Type: Contract Company Introduction We have an exciting opportunity now available with one of our sector-leading financial services clients They are currently looking for a skilled Data Architect to join their team for a contract until the end of November. Job Responsibilities/Objectives You will be a technical lead aligned to our Storage & Data Protection Services infrastructure team. Your primary focus will be on building, expanding, and optimizing our data platforms. You will develop high performance data products and data pipelines to further enable our data driven approach. You will support the improvement of our data self-service capability, building the technology to allow users to analyse the data they need on demand. You will be a part of a highly skilled, self-organising team whilst building forward-thinking solutions and creating new capabilities to support multiple, cross-functional teams. We are continuously looking to further improve our technology stack, data quality and reliability, and your vision and ambition will contribute to shaping our solutions toward data-driven decisions across the business. The ideal candidate is self-directed, comfortable with challenging and leading on best practice, and able to adapt to regularly shifting business requirements and occasional ambiguity. This is a fast-paced hands-on role, and would be well-suited to someone who loves clean design, clean architecture and using the latest tools and technology to tackle constantly evolving business and tech challenges. Work alongside our SME/Storage Architect to deliver a strategic solution that will uplift our monitoring and alerting capability to higher maturity levels, positioning us to deliver end-to-end observability. Support the design of the infrastructure required for optimal extraction, transformation, and loading of data from a wide variety of data sources using API's, SQL and 'big data' technologies. Create and maintain optimal data pipeline architecture. Assemble large, complex data sets that meet functional/non-functional business requirements. Identify, design, and implement internal process improvements: automating manual processes, optimizing data delivery, re-designing infrastructure for greater scalability. Work with stakeholders to assist with data-related technical issues and delivery. Work with data and analytics experts to strive for greater functionality in our data systems. Keep up-to-date and have expertise on current tools, technologies and areas like cyber security and regulations pertaining to aspects like data privacy, consent, data residency etc. that are applicable. Ensuring compliance with all relevant controls and standards Required Skills/Experience We are looking for a candidate with experience in leading/developing a data platform, you should also have hands-on experience in most of the following key areas: Working with raw data, structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. Experience combining large, disconnected datasets, using relevant tools and frameworks. Building and optimizing ETL / ELT data pipelines Experience of source control, Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment through CICD Pipelines Knowledge and/or experience with Splunk, Kafka & Grafana is beneficial. Supporting and working with BI and Analytics teams in a dynamic environment Knowledge of Scrum, Kanban or other agile frameworks. Work with Agile methodology, representing the Pod and Area lead in standups and problem-solving meetings. Enables SRE culture through solving problems with data engineering. Experience working in relevant market/context, i.e. IT in finance, is desirable. Able to collaborate and effectively pair with other engineers/architects. Self-awareness with confidence to work independently and take responsibility for own development. Excellent written and spoken communication skills; an ability to communicate with impact, ensuring complex information is articulated in a meaningful way to wide and varied audiences. Willingness to undertake the training / study required in this role for new products and services. If you are interested in this opportunity, please apply now with your updated CV in Microsoft Word/PDF format. Disclaimer Notwithstanding any guidelines given to level of experience sought, we will consider candidates from outside this range if they can demonstrate the necessary competencies. Square One is acting as both an employment agency and an employment business, and is an equal opportunities recruitment business. Square One embraces diversity and will treat everyone equally. Please see our website for our full diversity statement