Senior Data Architect

Contract Inside IR35 & Duration: 6 Months
Location: London, UK

Work mode: Hybrid WFO 2 days a week.

• Streaming & EDA Kafka (Confluent) and AWS MSK/Kinesis/Kinesis Firehose; outbox, ordering, replay, exactly/at-least-once semantics. EventBridge for event routing and filtering.
• Schema Management Avro/Protobuf + Schema Registry (compatibility, subject strategy, evolution).
• AWS Data Stack S3/Glue/Athena, Redshift, Step Functions, Lambda; Iceberg-ready lakehouse patterns. Kinesis S3 Glue streaming pipelines; Glue Streaming; DLQ patterns.
• Payments & ISO 20022 PAIN/PACS/CAMT, lifecycle modeling, reconciliation/advices; API/File/SWIFT channel knowledge.
• Governance Data-mesh mindset; ownership, quality SLAs, access, retention, lineage.
• Observability & FinOps Build dashboards, alerts, and cost KPIs; troubleshoot lag/throughput at scale.
• Delivery Production code, performance profiling, code reviews, automated tests, secure by design.
• Data Architecture Fundamentals
  • Logical Data Modeling Entity-relationship diagrams, normalization (1NF through Boyce-Codd/BCNF), denormalization trade-offs; identify functional dependencies and key anomalies.
  • Physical Data Modeling Table design, partitioning strategies, indexes; SCD types; dimensional vs. transactional schemas; storage patterns for OLTP vs. analytics.
  • Normalization & Design Normalize to 3NF/BCNF for OLTP; understand when to denormalize for queries; trade-offs between 3NF, Data Vault, and star schemas.
  • CQRS Separate read/write models; event sourcing and state reconstruction; eventual consistency patterns; when CQRS is justified vs. overkill.
  • Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) Event-first design; aggregate boundaries and invariants; publish/subscribe patterns; saga orchestration; idempotency and at-least-once delivery.
  • Bounded Contexts & Domain Modeling Core/supporting/generic subdomains; context maps (anti-corruption layers, shared kernel, conformist, published language); ubiquitous language.
  • Entities, Value Objects & Repositories Domain entity identity; immutability for value objects; repository abstraction over persistence; temporal/versioned records.
  Domain Events & Contracts Schema versioning (Avro/Protobuf); backward/forward compatibility; event replay; mapping domain events to Kafka topics and Aurora tables.