Principal Data Architect (Databricks & AI)

Location: London, United Kingdom — Canada Square. Applicants may be required to attend onsite interviews at a hirify.global office.

Company

hirify.global provides information, software, and data solutions that support professional and business decision-making.

What you will do

• Define the target data architecture, standards, reference patterns, and technical roadmap for a strategic enterprise data capability.
• Design a secure and scalable Databricks lakehouse using medallion architecture across Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers.
• Create canonical, dimensional, and semantic data models for consistent exchange and reuse across product domains.
• Architect batch, streaming, API, change-data-capture, and event-driven integrations.
• Design privacy-preserving and AI-ready data capabilities, including governed model-data pipelines, vector search, and retrieval-augmented generation patterns.
• Prototype solutions, review designs and code, optimize performance, and resolve complex technical issues while partnering with product, engineering, AI, security, platform, and business leaders.

Requirements

• Significant experience as a Data Architect, Lead Data Architect, Principal Data Engineer, or comparable senior technical leader.
• Advanced hands-on production experience with Databricks, lakehouse architecture, Delta Lake, governance, workflows, SQL, and optimization.
• Strong expertise in data privacy, security, masking, anonymization, tokenization, and sensitive customer-data environments.
• Deep experience with conceptual, logical, physical, dimensional, and canonical data modeling.
• Experience with batch and real-time integration, APIs, CDC, streaming, or event-driven pipelines.
• Strong data-engineering or software-development skills with Python, SQL, Scala, Java, and/or Spark, plus deep experience with Azure data services.

Nice to have

• Production AI/ML or generative-AI data architecture, including RAG, embeddings, vector search, or model-data pipelines.
• Knowledge of knowledge graphs, ontologies, RDF, linked data, or advanced semantic technologies.
• Databricks, cloud architecture, or data-engineering certification.
• Experience with dbt, Kafka, Airflow, Terraform, Power BI, Tableau, Collibra, or Microsoft Purview.
• Architecture experience across multiple products or regulated B2B software and information-service environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Shape a strategically important data foundation from the beginning.
• Make high-impact architectural decisions across products and business domains.
• Work on complex technical challenges involving trusted data, analytics, and AI.
• Mentor data engineers and architects and promote reusable platform capabilities and engineering standards.

Hiring process

• Participate in interviews without AI tools or external prompts.
• Interviews may include onsite participation at a hirify.global office.
• Use of AI-generated responses or third-party support during interviews may result in disqualification.