GCP Data Architect

Role: GCP Data Architect Type: Contract Inside IR35 Duration: 6 months Mode: Hybrid working (2 days office / week) Location: Berkshire, UK NOTE: No Visa Sponsorship

The Role The GCP Solution Architect / Data Architect plays a critical role in designing, governing, and delivering enterprise-scale data and cloud solutions across finance transformation programmes. This hybrid position combines strategic solution architecture with hands-on data architecture expertise to enable resilient, scalable, and cost-effective data platforms. The role ensures alignment with enterprise standards, supports quarterly planning, and guides engineering teams through iterative delivery cycles. Your responsibilities: Solution Architecture

• Lead end-to-end architecture design for cloud-native data solutions on GCP.
• Shape architectural direction, ensuring alignment with security, data governance, and compliance standards.
• Drive iterative design practices, influencing product owners, engineering teams, and cross-platform stakeholders.
• Develop architectural roadmaps supporting quarterly planning cycles and long-term finance transformation goals. Data Architecture
• Design conceptual, logical, and physical data models for financial, regulatory, and operational datasets.
• Define ingestion, transformation, storage, and consumption patterns.
• Establish principles for metadata, lineage, reference data, and data stewardship.
• Collaborate with SMEs to translate business requirements into scalable data models. GCP Engineering Alignment
• Architect solutions using GCP services such as BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, Composer, Cloud Functions, and IAM.
• Design cost-optimized workloads and implement best practices for performance and scalability.
• Support engineering teams with reusable patterns, blueprint architectures, and cloud engineering guidance. Collaboration & Governance
• Work with CTO architects, data platform teams, and transformation leads to influence platform decisions.
• Participate in architecture boards, design forums, and technical governance committees.
• Clearly articulate technical decisions and direction to non-technical and senior stakeholders. Good-to-Have Skills Your Profile Essential skills/knowledge/experience:
• Strong expertise in GCP architecture (BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, IAM, Composer).
• Proven experience designing complex, cross-team, enterprise-scale solutions.
• Advanced data modelling (3NF, Data Vault, dimensional modelling).
• Deep understanding of metadata, lineage, data governance, and reference data frameworks.
• Strong experience with finance data flows—ledger, MI, reconciliation, and reporting.
• Ability to lead engineering teams and drive architectural consistency. Qualifications
• Google Professional Cloud Architect (PCA) – preferred.
• Google Professional Data Engineer (PDE) – preferred.
• TOGAF or equivalent enterprise architecture certification – desirable. Desirable skills/knowledge/experience: (As applicable)
• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines (Cloud Build, GitHub Actions, Jenkins).
• Infrastructure as Code using Terraform.
• Familiarity with data quality and lineage tools.
• Understanding of hybrid and multi-cloud patterns.
• Strong communication, negotiation, and stakeholder management skills.