Databricks Champion Architect

The team you'll be working with:

We are looking for a Databricks Champion Architect to define, govern, and evangelise modern lakehouse architectures on Databricks. This role blends solution architecture, hands-on technical leadership, and platform enablement-setting standards and accelerating delivery teams through patterns, reference implementations, and best practices.

A minimum bar is 2+ years of Databricks experience in recent years, demonstrating strong familiarity with modern capabilities and current platform patterns (not legacy Spark-only experience).

What you'll be doing:

• Own the end-to-end Databricks solution architecture across ingestion, transformation, governance, serving, and operations.
• Define and enforce Medallion Architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold) standards and reference designs (including data quality, SCD/CDC patterns, performance, and retention).
• Architect ingestion approaches using Lakeflow Connect, AutoLoader, batch/streaming/CDC strategies, and enterprise integration patterns.
• Establish platform governance using Unity Catalog:
• Namespace strategy, access models, lineage, data sharing, and secure-by-design patterns.
• Define the approach for Declarative Pipelines with Expectations (DLT):
• Data quality strategy, validation rules, quarantine patterns, and observability standards.
• Champion "production-ready" engineering standards:
• CI/CD approach, environment strategy (dev/test/prod), monitoring, runbooks, and operational readiness.
• Drive stakeholder alignment:
• Work with security, enterprise architecture, data governance, platform teams, and delivery squads.
• Enable and upskill teams:
• Provide playbooks, templates, architecture decision records (ADRs), design reviews, and technical coaching.
• Contribute to pre-sales and roadmap:
• High-level designs, estimation, risk/dependency management, and technical proposals.

What experience you'll bring:

Minimum Experience

• 2+ years of hands-on Databricks experience gained recently (e.g., within the last 2-3 years) with evidence of modern feature usage and production delivery.
• Demonstrable architecture ownership (solution design, governance models, or platform standards), even if overall industry experience is greater than 2 years.

Must Have

• Databricks Certification (active/current): two of:
• Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate/Professional
• Databricks Certified Machine Learning Associate/Professional
• Databricks Certified Generative AI Engineer (Associate)
• Medallion Architecture design ownership:
• Proven ability to design Bronze/Silver/Gold layers, data contracts, data lifecycle, and serving patterns (BI, APIs, ML features).
• Unity Catalog architecture experience:
• Governance model design (catalog strategy, grants), lineage, and secure access patterns.
• Declarative Pipelines with Expectations (DLT):
• Architectural understanding plus practical experience implementing expectations, failure handling, and quality reporting.
• Ingestion architecture & delivery:
• Hands-on experience designing ingestion using AutoLoader and/or Lakeflow Connect (including schema evolution, incremental loads, and operational patterns).
• Databricks experience with latest capabilities:
• Candidate can clearly articulate what modern features they used recently and why (platform evolution awareness is essential for this role).

Should Have

• Strong command of Delta Lake and performance patterns:
• MERGE/CDC strategies, partitioning/file sizing, OPTIMIZE/ZORDER, VACUUM, table maintenance automation.
• Production architecture practices:
• Environment separation, secrets management, job orchestration standards (Databricks Workflows), testing strategy, and observability.
• Cloud platform integration understanding (one or more of Azure/AWS/GCP):
• Identity, networking, storage, and security integration considerations.
• Ability to influence and standardise across teams:
• Templates, reference repos, reusable components, and governance guardrails.

Nice to Have

• Lakeflow ingestion connectors experience (specific connector implementations).
• RBAC / masking expertise:
• Row-level security, column masking, sensitive data classification patterns in Unity Catalog.
• GenAI capabilities on Databricks:
• Mosaic AI, Vector Search, model serving, RAG architectures, AI Functions.
• Lakebase awareness or hands-on experience.
• Workload & query optimisation at scale:
• Photon adoption patterns, cluster policy design, skew/shuffle tuning, streaming tuning, concurrency strategies.
• Cost governance:
• Understanding cost drivers (DBUs/compute types), chargeback/showback approaches, cluster policies, and cost controls.

Who we are:

We're a business with a global reach that empowers local teams, and we undertake hugely exciting work that is genuinely changing the world. Our advanced portfolio of consulting, applications, business process, cloud, and infrastructure services will allow you to achieve great things by working with brilliant colleagues, and clients, on exciting projects.

what we'll offer you:

We offer a range of tailored benefits that support your physical, emotional, and financial wellbeing. Our Learning and Development team ensure that there are continuous growth and development opportunities for our people. We also offer the opportunity to have flexible work options.

You can find more information about NTT DATA UK & Ireland here: https://uk.nttdata.com/

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