Data Architect

JOB DESCRIPTION

At Canopius, our delivery teams are responsible for ensuring that business users can effectively harness data insights to drive strategic decision making. Our data strategy is centred around an enterprise Lakehouse platform on Databricks, avoiding fragmented, ungoverned silos on legacy technologies that hamper creativity and scalability.

The Data Architect owns the end-to-end design and evolution of our enterprise data architecture, defining how data is stored, integrated, secured, and managed across solutions. The ideal candidate will be an experienced data architect who is excited by the opportunity to shape enterprise data standards, drive data re-use and interoperability across the organization, and leverage modern technologies to simplify the data estate and unlock greater value from data.

You should be able to understand business problems and translate them into robust, efficient and well-governed data designs, including conceptual, logical and physical data models, while owning and maintaining data modelling standards and architecture principles. You should be comfortable collaborating in project teams and cross‑departmental squads including business analysts, data analysts, developers and solution architects to deliver business solutions. The role also owns the end-to-end data architecture of our enterprise Lakehouse platform on Databricks, including data modelling, storage patterns, integration approaches, data sharing patterns and governance guardrails.

In addition, the role is responsible for shaping the future‑state data architecture, supporting transition roadmaps, and driving simplification through the rationalisation of legacy data assets and technical debt.

The candidate should be a practical, delivery-focused architect with strong interpersonal skills and a proven track record of producing data architecture artifacts, shaping solution designs and working closely with delivery teams to implement robust data solutions.

• Define conceptual, logical and physical data models, information models and associated data dictionaries to meet enterprise and delivery-specific requirements.
• Own the end-to-end architecture of the enterprise Lakehouse platform on Databricks, including data modelling, storage layers, processing patterns, integration approaches and data sharing standards.
• Define and evolve the future-state data architecture and associated transition roadmaps, identifying opportunities to simplify the landscape through rationalisation of legacy data assets, duplicated capabilities and technical debt.
• Define data architecture principles, guardrails, standards and reusable patterns, ensuring alignment to enterprise naming conventions, canonical business definitions and domain boundaries.
• Define and evolve insurance data models and standards across underwriting, policy, claims, finance, actuarial and regulatory use cases.
• Define security, privacy and regulatory requirements for data architecture, including data classification, access control, retention, lineage, metadata and information quality controls.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders, delivery teams and solution architects to capture data requirements, shape solution options and communicate risks, issues and trade-offs.
• Partner closely with data engineers and solution teams to ensure architecture designs can be implemented at scale and aligned to modern engineering patterns and best practices.
• Define data integration solutions and source-to-target mappings between business applications as well as between applications and the data platform, to ensure that data is synchronised promptly as required and remains in line with relevant data models and data quality controls.
• Produce and maintain the reference data catalogue, ensuring that reference data is understood, fit for purpose, aligned with enterprise standards and appropriately versioned and maintained.
• Review and contribute to solution design artefacts in collaboration with Data Governance and Compliance to ensure that data quality, governance, security and privacy requirements are addressed appropriately, and contribute to architecture…