We are looking for a Principal Data Architect who will play a crucial role in delivering measurable business value through the strategic use of Data and Analytics across the organisation. This position requires a strong blend of technical depth, functional understanding, and leadership capability to drive complex, end-to-end data programmes. The role spans consulting, architectural design, engineering oversight, and solution definition, ensuring that all data initiatives are effectively aligned with organisational goals and delivered to a consistently high standard. The ideal candidate will bring extensive experience across data engineering, data and solution architecture, data integration, master data management, data quality, enterprise data warehousing, and analytics. They will be responsible for shaping the data strategy, providing technical authority, and leading programmes that maximise the organisation's ability to leverage its data assets. Key Responsibilities Translate business objectives into a clear, scalable, and future-proof data architecture. Design and oversee an end-to-end data ecosystem supporting workloads across multiple cloud environments including GCP and AWS. Define architectural standards covering data ingestion, transformation, modelling, governance, and quality. Lead the design and delivery of robust ETL/ELT pipelines, ensuring they are efficient, maintainable, and scalable. Establish strong data quality frameworks including validation, monitoring, and automated testing. Implement and manage metadata, lineage, cataloguing, and data discoverability practices across the organisation. Define and enforce access controls, security policies, compliance controls, and data protection measures. Introduce effective monitoring and observability practices to ensure visibility, reliability, and rapid issue resolution. Develop resilient data pipelines with appropriate retry mechanisms, idempotency, incremental processing, and fault tolerance. Support disaster recovery and high-availability strategies across multi-cloud environments. Work closely with analytics and BI teams to enable governed self-service and reliable access to data. Guide squads and product teams in owning and managing their data domains with clear data contracts. Mentor and support data engineers, setting high technical and operational standards. Collaborate with product managers, engineering leaders, and senior stakeholders to deliver trusted, high-quality data solutions. Demonstrate ownership, structured thinking, and strong judgement in complex situations. Maintain excellent attention to detail while balancing multiple priorities and stakeholders. Experience & Skills Required 10 years' experience in data engineering, data architecture, or data platform roles. Strong experience designing and building large-scale data architectures across cloud environments. Deep knowledge of data ingestion patterns, data modelling, data warehousing, and data lake approaches. Proven ability to design and manage ETL/ELT processes and workflows at scale. Strong understanding of governance principles including metadata management, lineage, security, and compliance. Solid background in observability, reliability engineering, and operational best practices for data systems. Proficiency in SQL and a strong command of programming languages (e.g., Python). Experience driving architectural standards, best practices, and technical strategy within engineering teams. Experience in modern analytics practices, BI enablement, and self-service data models. Experience with streaming, batch processing, and event-driven data architecture patterns. Strong behavioural attributes: ownership, structured thinking, attention to detail, and clear communication. Experience working in fast-moving or scale-up environments