Lead Data Architect

Package:  Competitive Salary + Benefits

Role ID:    SF19582

Are you ready to be part of the future? At QinetiQ, we’re not just imagining tomorrow we are creating it. From cutting edge defence technology to ground breaking innovations our mission is to empower and protect lives. Join us as a Lead Data Architect at our Farnborough site, where you will have the opportunity to work with cutting-edge technology in partnership with some of the most brilliant minds.

The Role

A Lead Data Architect, you take ownership of our data fabric architecture and be responsible for its evolution, adoption, and deployment into secure customer environments blending both strategy and delivery.

Day-to-day, you will set the technical direction, make pragmatic architectural decision, and provide hands-on leadership to a team of Data Fabric Engineers and Data Analysts ensuring the platform remains secure, scalable, resilient, and operable as it grows. You will maintain and refine the target architecture and roadmap, establish standards and governance staying close enough to engineering to ensure designs are buildable, testable, and supportable.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Being openly enthusiastic about unlocking AI capability through the strategic delivery of a Data Fabric focusing on data quality, governance, accessibility, and integration


• Owning the Data Fabric architecture end-to-end: integration, processing, storage, metadata/lineage, governance, and consumption patterns


• Defining and maintaining the architecture roadmap (near, mid, and long-term) including technology evolution, capability increments, and deployment waves across environments


• Leading architecture for data integration and interoperability: connector strategy, data sharing patterns, event-driven integration, APIs, interface contracts, and cross-domain data exchange approaches where relevant


• Translating architectural intent into reference architectures, patterns and guardrails enabling repeatable delivery by the engineering team


• Establishing and running architecture governance and assurance and leading data modelling across conceptual, logical, and physical levels including analytical models suited to downstream use

Essential experience of the Lead Data Architect:

• Extensive experience in data architecture and/or data platform engineering including the ownership of architecture on complex programmes


• Proven experience taking an established architecture, owning it, and evolving it through clear roadmaps, standards, patterns and governance


• A good knowledge of on-prem, cloud and hybrid platforms with a strong knowledge of data governance, metadata, lineage, data quality, stewardship, and lifecycle management


• Previous experience designing and governing architectures for constrained or mission environments, including edge deployments and contested connectivity patterns


• Proven experience leading engineers with a clear technical direction in place whilst making pragmatic decisions and mentoring in a multidisciplinary environment


• The ability to explain complex architecture to senior stakeholders with excellent written and verbal communication skills

Essential qualifications for the Lead Data Architect:

We value difference and we don’t have a fixed idea when it comes to background or education, provided you can show the required level of experience and willingness to learn then we would like to hear from you. 

This role is 37 hours per week based at our Farnborough site. Hybrid working patterns are available.

Farnborough

At our Farnborough site exciting work takes place at our state-of-the-art facility, with high-energy laser technologies, our 5m pressurised wind tunnel which has a simulation capability that is unique in the UK and our large research and development projects is a real hub of creativity, research and innovation. Join our talented teams of Engineers, IT & Cyber Specialists, Project Managers, Group Functions Teams and many more to provide future defences in the UK.