Senior Solution Architect, Data & AI

Role summary

Customer strategy and modernisation

• Advise customers on enterprise data strategy, target-state architecture, and practical roadmaps for analytics, operational decisions, and AI.
• Assess legacy warehouses, databases, and fragmented data estates; define migration approaches, phased roadmaps, risks, dependencies, and quick wins.
• Lead discovery with business, data, and IT stakeholders and qualify technical requirements on opportunities.

Architecture and platform design

• Design lakehouse, warehouse, federated, and data-product architectures using appropriate modelling patterns.
• Define ingestion and integration across batch, streaming, and change data capture, plus ETL/ELT, transformation, and orchestration approaches.
• Design logical storage, open table formats, database selection, partitioning, retention, and lifecycle management with infrastructure architects.
• Design semantic and business-model layers for consistent BI, self-service analytics, and AI; guide analytics and visualisation choices without building dashboards or reports.
• Ensure data platforms provide the quality, context, access, and governance needed for AI and machine learning.

Governance, security, and cost

• Design cataloguing, lineage, ownership, business classification, data quality, and access policies into solutions.
• Build security, privacy, monitoring, reliability, and cost management into every architecture layer.
• Explain consumption-based platform costs and ways customers can optimise them; coordinate data protection and infrastructure with specialist practices.

Practice and sales contributions

• Provide impartial, evidence-based advice across platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric, and Starburst.
• Contribute reference architectures, modernisation assessments, demonstrations, and packaged offerings to the Data Platforms go-to-market.
• Support sales enablement and the development of colleagues across the practice.

Candidate qualifications

• The role calls for technical and commercial awareness and the ability to communicate with a wide range of customer stakeholders.
• The architect is expected to turn customer goals into technically valid and commercially credible designs.

Working relationships

• Work with Solution Sales Specialists, partners, and architects in related domains.
• Physical storage, infrastructure, and cloud platforms are handled by the Hybrid Platforms practice; data protection and governance are supported by the Security practice.