Location
London

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Negotiable

About the Role
At Burberry, creativity opens spaces. We unlock the power of imagination to push boundaries and open new possibilities for our people, customers, and communities. As a purposeful, values-driven brand, we are committed to sustainable luxury, driving industry change, and championing our communities.

The Data Platform Architect is accountable for the technical architecture of the enterprise data platform, ensuring it supports a growing data estate with performance, cost efficiency, security, and alignment to enterprise standards. This role owns the internal technical architecture including compute and storage design, ingestion frameworks, data modelling standards, access control, platform performance, capacity planning, and architectural governance.

The architect defines standards, provides design governance, and ensures scalable, consistent solutions aligned with the enterprise technology strategy. They participate in cross-functional squads to provide architectural input for complex data initiatives and collaborate closely with teams across Enterprise Data, Platforms & Operations, Data Governance, Cyber Security, and strategic vendors.

Key responsibilities include designing and maintaining platform architecture, defining architectural standards and guardrails, owning platform cost modelling and FinOps governance, and translating architectural direction into practical engineering guidance. The role also involves designing data ingestion architectures, semantic layers, and self-serve analytics infrastructure, supporting emerging requirements such as agentic AI data infrastructure and MLOps productionisation.

Collaboration with Senior Managers in Data Platform Engineering and Data Engineering ensures alignment of operations and engineering work with architectural standards. The architect owns the data platform roadmap, contributes to enterprise architecture governance, provides input on vendor and tooling decisions, and maintains comprehensive documentation of design decisions and standards.

Non-functional platform architecture standards covering resilience, disaster recovery, observability, service levels, auditability, and operational readiness are defined in partnership with Cyber Security and Data Governance. The role establishes architecture decision records, exception processes, and design scorecards to govern deviations from standards and maintains metrics to guide roadmap priorities and governance decisions.

Experience
- 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 for engineering teams and setting direction without hands-on delivery.
- Experience working within a centralised architecture function engaging flexibly with delivery squads.
- Ability to communicate architectural decisions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Experience establishing architectural authority in transitioning environments from outsourced to in-house ownership.
- 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 without slowing delivery.

About you
Strategic thinker with strong leadership and communication skills. Comfortable working across multiple teams and stakeholders to drive architectural consistency and excellence. Proactive in maintaining architectural governance and standards while enabling agile delivery. Passionate about sustainable technology solutions and continuous improvement.

Qualifications
Relevant technical qualifications or equivalent experience in data architecture, cloud platforms, or enterprise architecture are preferred but not mandatory. A commitment to ongoing professional development and staying current with emerging technologies is essential.