Location
London

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Negotiable

About the Role
At Burberry, creativity opens spaces. We aim to 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 architecture standards. This role owns the internal technical architecture including compute and storage design, ingestion framework patterns, data modelling standards, access control architecture, platform performance and capacity planning.

The architect defines standards, provides design governance, and ensures solutions are consistent, scalable, and aligned with the enterprise technology strategy. They participate in cross-functional squads providing architectural guidance for complex data initiatives and maintain architectural authority through documentation and knowledge retention.

Key responsibilities include designing and maintaining platform architecture, defining architectural standards and guardrails, owning platform cost modelling and FinOps governance, aligning with senior architects, translating architectural direction into engineering guidance, and supporting emerging requirements such as agentic AI data infrastructure and MLOps productionisation.

The role collaborates closely with Senior Managers in Data Platform Engineering and Data Engineering to ensure alignment with target architecture and standards. It also involves owning the data platform roadmap, contributing to enterprise architecture governance, providing architectural input on vendor and tooling decisions, and maintaining comprehensive documentation.

Non-functional architecture standards covering resilience, backup/restore, disaster recovery, observability, service levels, auditability, operational readiness, and platform security and privacy are defined in partnership with Cyber Security and Data Governance. The architect establishes architecture decision records, exception processes, and design scorecards to govern deviations from platform standards.

Performance, cost, adoption, and standards-compliance metrics are maintained to guide roadmap priorities and architecture 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 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 technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Experience establishing architectural authority in transitioning environments.
- Experience defining non-functional requirements and architecture patterns for 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 governance without slowing delivery.

About you
You are a strategic thinker with strong technical expertise and excellent communication skills. You thrive in collaborative environments and can influence across teams and stakeholders. You are committed to maintaining high architectural standards while enabling agile delivery. You are motivated by innovation and continuous improvement, with a passion for sustainable and secure technology solutions.

Qualifications
Relevant technical qualifications or equivalent experience in data platform architecture, cloud technologies, and enterprise architecture are expected. Continuous professional development and certifications related to cloud platforms, data engineering, or architecture frameworks are advantageous.