Lead Data Architect Senior – Belgium; Hybrid

About the Company

The Ghent University Hospital (UZG) is a university hospital in Ghent. As a leading university hospital, we strive for top quality care and combine warmth and empathy for our patients and employees with bold innovations. The organization invests thoughtfully in research, state‑of‑the‑art infrastructure, technology, education, and effective organizational forms, delivering a high‑quality and efficient healthcare offering tailored to our unique expertise within a sustainable framework.

PROUNITY

The Lead Data Architect is responsible for defining, designing, and leading the implementation of a modern data platform. This role ensures coordination between the business, IT, and data teams while delivering a scalable, secure, and future‑proof data architecture.

• Design and implement the cloud infrastructure (Azure), including compute, storage, and networking.
• Establish and maintain Dev Ops practices: CI/CD pipelines, environments (dev/test/prod), monitoring, and alerting.
• Implement security and access controls in accordance with the ICT policy.
• Automate platform operations to reduce manual work and risk.
• Ensure that the platform is production‑ready and operationally robust.
• Guarantee security, access control, and compliance (IAM, networks, secrets, GDPR‑by‑design).
• Monitor performance, reliability, and costs of the data platform.
• Support Dev Ops, Data Ops, and MLOps practices across analytics and AI workloads.

• Several years of experience deploying and maintaining cloud environments, preferably Azure.
• Experience setting up CI/CD pipelines and automating platform operations.
• Works seamlessly within enterprise ICT standards and compliance frameworks (GDPR, IAM, security policies).

• Strong knowledge of Azure: networking, storage, compute, and security.
• Fluent with Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform, Bicep, ARM) and CI/CD tooling (Azure Dev Ops, Git Hub Actions).
• Experience setting up monitoring, alerting, logging, and cost management at the platform level.
• Knowledge of IAM, secrets management, private endpoints, and network segmentation.

• Automation reflex: if it has to happen twice, it will be scripted.
• Reliability‑oriented:
  Stability, performance, and safety as standard.
• Hands‑on and pragmatic in problem solving.
• Collaborative with ICT, governance, and the data teams.
• Operational discipline with an eye for neat documentation.
• Act according to the UZG core values: respectful, honest, and responsible.

• Azure
• Data Governance
• Data modeling
• Databricks
• Data Ops concepts
• ETL
• GDPR
• Git
• Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Modern Data Platform
• MySQL
• Power BI
• Roadmap