Principal Data Solution Architect

Location – Leeds/Dublin/London. Hybrid. Permanent.

In Flutter COO we work with experts across Flutter to build, deploy and communicate the Flutter Edge. We cover Product&Payments, Technology, Sports book Product&Trading, People, Property, Corporate Communications and Strategic Partnerships&Transformation. We are seeking a Principal Data Solution Architect to design and deliver distributed data platforms that power Flutter’s applications across Gaming and Sports book. The role is focused on execution and solutions delivery – building scalable, high‑performance data platforms that enable real‑time and batch data processing at scale.

• Drive platform capability improvements – continuously enhance distributed data platforms using knowledge of Spark, Databricks, Kafka, Pulsar, Cassandra, and object stores to maintain best‑in‑class capabilities.
• Enable application data consumption – understand how applications produce and consume data, designing solutions that enable efficient data access patterns, real‑time streaming, and batch processing for application needs.
• Architect data streaming solutions – design and implement real‑time data streaming architectures using Kafka and Pulsar, ensuring low‑latency data delivery to downstream applications and services.
• Design distributed data structures – work with engineering teams to design effective data structures for distributed systems like Cassandra, optimizing for read/write patterns, scalability, and performance.
• Deliver cloud‑native data solutions – architect and implement data platforms on AWS leveraging cloud native services, Databricks, object stores (S3), and distributed compute frameworks.
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring – mentor engineers and architects on distributed data platform patterns, helping teams deliver robust solutions and grow their technical capabilities.
• Develop executable roadmaps – create pragmatic technology roadmaps that deliver near‑term business value while progressing toward target state architectures for distributed data platforms.
• Partner with engineering teams – build strong relationships with engineering teams across Gaming and Sports book, understanding their data needs and translating them into scalable platform solutions.
• Design solutions for projects – deliver ADRs, data models, technical designs, and assessments to support delivery of business goals, working with engineering teams to bring solutions to life.
• Influence technical strategy – shape the technical direction of data platforms, considering future application requirements and emerging technologies in distributed systems and data streaming.
• Manage technology risk – identify, communicate, and mitigate technology risks associated with distributed systems, data platform decisions, and system integrations.
• Ensure operational excellence – design solutions with security, cost optimisation, performance, regulatory requirements, and compliance in mind.
• Contribute to architecture governance – support architecture forums and governance processes, ensuring timely review and alignment across Flutter.

• Distributed data platforms expertise – extensive experience designing and implementing distributed data platforms at scale, with deep understanding of distributed systems principles and trade‑offs.
• Data streaming architecture – proven track record architecting and implementing real‑time / low‑latency data streaming platforms including patterns for event‑driven architectures.
• OLTP, No
  
  SQL and distributed databases – experience with Cassandra or similar distributed databases, understanding data structures, partitioning strategies, consistency models, and performance optimisation, as well as OLTP databases such as Postgre
  
  SQL and MySQL.
• Distributed compute frameworks – strong experience with Apache Spark and distributed data processing, including optimisation, performance tuning, and large‑scale batch/streaming workloads.
• Cloud‑native data platforms – demonstrated experience with any Cloud Providers such as AWS, GCP, Azure, including Databricks.
• Application‑aware data architecture – strong understanding of how applications produce and consume data,…