Location
Central London office (required onsite four days a week)

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Negotiable

About the Role
At Burberry, creativity opens spaces and drives us to push boundaries and unlock new possibilities for our people, customers, and communities. As a purposeful, values-driven luxury brand, we are committed to sustainable innovation and industry leadership.

The Data Platform Architect is accountable for the technical architecture of Burberry’s enterprise data platform. This role ensures the platform meets the demands of a growing data estate while maintaining performance, cost efficiency, security, and alignment with enterprise architecture standards. You will own the internal technical architecture including compute and storage design, ingestion framework patterns, data modelling standards, access control architecture, platform performance and capacity planning.

You will define architecture, set standards, provide design governance, and ensure consistency, scalability, and alignment with the enterprise technology strategy. The role involves collaborating with cross-functional squads, providing architectural input for complex data initiatives, and supporting Data Product Managers and Data Engineers where architectural complexity requires it.

Key responsibilities include designing and maintaining platform architecture, defining architectural standards and guardrails, owning platform cost modelling and FinOps governance, aligning with senior solution architects, and translating architectural direction into practical engineering guidance. You will also contribute to enterprise architecture governance, vendor and tooling decisions, and maintain comprehensive documentation of design decisions and standards.

This role requires close collaboration with Senior Managers in Data Platform Engineering and Data Engineering to ensure platform operations and engineering work align with the target architecture. You will own the data platform roadmap from an architectural perspective and define non-functional platform architecture standards covering resilience, disaster recovery, observability, service levels, auditability, operational readiness, security, and privacy.

Burberry values a culture of architectural authority, governance, and continuous improvement to support emerging requirements such as agentic AI data infrastructure, MLOps productionisation, and advanced analytics, all within a luxury retail context.

Experience
7–10+ years in data platform architecture, data engineering, or cloud data infrastructure.
Deep expertise in Databricks (Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, Spark, Databricks SQL) or equivalent Lakehouse platforms including administration, cost management, and performance optimisation.
Strong understanding of cloud-native architecture principles, cost models, CI/CD pipelines, and environment strategies.
Proven implementation of data security including encryption, RBAC, column/row-level security, and data masking.
Strong knowledge of ingestion and pipeline architecture patterns for diverse source systems.
Experience with SAP data landscapes (BW, Datasphere, S/4HANA data flows) is highly desirable.
Experience defining architectural standards and patterns and setting direction without hands-on delivery.
Experience working within a centralised architecture function engaging flexibly with delivery squads.
Experience in Retail, Luxury, or Consumer goods industries is beneficial.
Experience defining non-functional requirements and architecture patterns for enterprise-grade resilience, observability, disaster recovery, data lifecycle management, and operational readiness.
Experience using architecture decision records, design authorities, exception management, and measurable standards adoption to embed architectural governance.

About you
Ability to communicate architectural decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Ability to thrive in evolving environments, balancing pragmatic delivery with long-term strategy.
Experience establishing architectural authority in environments transitioning from outsourced to in-house ownership is beneficial.
Committed to driving sustainable, scalable, and secure data platform solutions.
Collaborative mindset with strong stakeholder engagement skills.

Qualifications
No specific formal qualifications required; however, relevant certifications or degrees in computer science, engineering, or related fields are advantageous.
A positive attitude towards continuous learning and architectural excellence is essential.