Our client, a prominent insurance company based in Malta, is seeking a dedicated Senior Data Architect to join their team. The Senior Data Architect is accountable for translating business strategy into a future-ready, cloud-native data platform, ensuring operational resilience, regulatory compliance, and seamless integration with enterprise architecture. To achieve this the Architect is responsible for the overall design and governance of data architecture, enabling real-time operational data activation, supporting both analytics and core business processes through robust API and streaming architectures. As the architectural lead, this role defines the frameworks, models, and standards that guide the design of a data lake house-centric stack. The Data Architect will have explicit ownership of the AWS-native within the corporate platform and Party 360 target data architecture, covering batch and streaming ingestion, processing, storage, and activation patterns. The architect will also have responsibility for ensuring the data platform is GenAI-ready, supporting unstructured data, controlled data access, traceability, and safe reuse of corporate data for AI use cases. If you feel you have the necessary skills, please apply for this Malta based role.
MAIN DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
- Define and maintain the enterprise data architecture, including conceptual, logical, and physical models.
- Establish and enforce architectural standards, best practices, and design patterns for data integration, storage, and access. Design for performance, scalability, and cost optimization, including partitioning, workload isolation, and storage tiering strategies in AWS.
- Conduct architecture reviews and solution assurance gates for all major data initiatives, ensuring alignment with reference architectures and risk management standards.
- Ensure data models support business processes, reporting, analytics, and regulatory requirements.
- Design and govern CDC and real-time streaming architectures, including RabbitMQ-based ingestion and near-real-time propagation to Snowflake using Snowpipe Streaming.
- Define and own orchestration standards using Apache Airflow, ensuring dependency management, resiliency, monitoring, and auditability across data pipelines.
- Architect GDPR-by-design data flows, including mandatory anonymization and masking at the landing layer prior to Party 360 and MDM processing.
- Own the integration of Tamr MDM (SaaS), including entity resolution, match-merge logic, survivorship rules, and golden-record lifecycle management.
- Partner with the Data Governance function to ensure alignment of architecture with data quality, lineage, metadata, and compliance frameworks. Define and implement enterprise metadata management and cataloging strategies, ensuring discoverability, stewardship, and automated lineage across all data assets
- Embed policy-as-code and automated governance guardrails to enforce data classification, retention, and access controls
- Ensure architecture supports GDPR, KYCP, and regulatory compliance across multiple lines of business.
- Establish DataOps practices, including CI/CD-enabled data pipelines, automated deployments, and embedded data quality validation (e.g. Great Expectations or equivalent).
- Ensure full auditability, lineage, and historization of batch and streaming data flows using immutable storage for regulatory and compliance purposes.
- Enable cross-functional teams to deliver data products through domain-oriented architecture patterns, providing technical leadership and support for federated data ownership.- Translate business strategy and requirements into scalable data architecture roadmaps.
- Collaborate with the Lead Data Engineer to ensure designs are implementable and sustainable.
- Support executive and senior management with architectural insights and solution options.
- Design API-driven data activation patterns (GraphQL, API Gateway) to expose golden customer records to operational systems such as Salesforce, Genesys, and Policy Center.
- Evaluate emerging technologies, platforms, and tools to recommend adoption where beneficial.
- Define the evolution roadmap towards scalable cloud-native and interoperable architectures.
- Ensure architectural resilience, performance, and security while enabling agility for analytics and AI use cases.
CANDIDATE PROFILE
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field.
- 10+ years of experience in data architecture, data modeling, or enterprise architecture.
- Deep expertise in conceptual, logical, and physical data modeling. Proficiency in designing semantic layers and governed metrics frameworks for BI and analytics platforms.
- Demonstrated experience architecting and implementing modern lakehouse data platforms
- Strong experience designing AWS-based data architectures (AWS S3, Glue, Lambda, DMS, API Gateway, Apache Iceberg, Snowflake for scalable governed storage and analytics).
- Proven ability to design and operate streaming data pipelines (e.g., using RabbitMQ, AWS DMS, or Kinesis) to enable real-time and batch data flows across the lakehouse architecture.
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and automated environment provisioning in AWS.
- Hands-on experience with batch and streaming data platforms and CDC architectures.
- Experience with Apache Airflow for orchestration.
- Experience with Snowflake and Snowpipe Streaming.
- Demonstrated ability to optimize cloud data platform costs and implement FinOps practices.
- Strong knowledge of master data management concepts and platforms (e.g. Tamr), metadata management, and data governance principles.
- Track record of delivering enterprise-wide architectural frameworks in complex organizations.
- Excellent communication skills, with ability to influence both technical and business stakeholders.
- Strategic Vision: Cloud-native, operational and GenAI-ready data platforms
- Architectural Rigor: Strong focus on frameworks, standards, and sustainable design.
- Operational Excellence: Drives continuous improvement in data platform reliability, observability, and incident management.
- Work hand-in-hand with engineering, governance, and business leaders.
- Evaluate and drive adoption of emerging technologies where beneficial.
- Provide thought leadership and architectural direction across projects and teams.
- Champion adoption of new technologies and practices, supporting organizational transformation and upskilling.
Due to the high volume of applications, we receive at GRS Recruitment, only shortlisted candidates will be responded to.