Data Architect

As a Data Architectfor Data, you are passionate about data and technology solutions and are driven to learn about them and keep up with market evolution. You will play an active role in delivering modern data solutions for clients including data ingestion/data pipeline design and implementation, data warehouse & data lake architectures, cognitive computing and cloud services. You are enthusiastic about all things data, have strong problem-solving and analytical skills, are tech savvy and have a solid understanding of software development.  

In this role you will be helping to grow the Rackspace data practice in Southeast Asia.  You will be the expert in the region and support the delivery of our data projects on Azure.   As the local expert you’ll be involved in presenting to customers at events and promoting our capabilities to Azure.  With a large Azure data team of over 150 people in the region it is also an opportunity to mentor and shape the data practice during our growth phase. 

More generally, Data Architect are the cornerstone of our delivery success, overseeing our most strategic accounts. They are empowered to make key delivery decisions and work closely with technical resources as well as our Engagement/Project Managers to ensure our customers experience successful outcomes.  

The Data Architect needs to understand client's business and technology requirements within their domain, identify gaps, areas of opportunity, and design future state improvements and lead the team of data engineers and data analysts to deliver these with high quality and customer satisfaction.

Key Requirements:
• 12+ years' experience leading engagements from design to implementation of creative data solutions leveraging the latest in Spark based modern data platforms on public cloud
• At least 5 full lifecycle data platform deployments on Azure using first party services for Data and Analytics.
• Extensive experience with following technologies: Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Databricks,
• Extensive experience of Azure foundation and cloud engineering concepts including network, security, cost estimation, common IaaS and PaaS services and monitoring.
• Strong Spark, SQL, Data Modeling, Data lakehouse concepts.
• Programming / scripting experience using python and scala.
• 6+ years' experience architecting solutions for optimal extraction, transformation and loading of data from a wide variety of traditional and non-traditional sources such as structured, unstructured, and semi-structured using SQL, NoSQL and data pipelines for real-time, streaming, batch and on-demand workloads 
• 4+ years' experience with analytics/data management strategy formulation, architectural blueprinting and effort estimation of analytics 
• 5+ years working in cloud or multi-server complex environments.  Extensive experience with Azure is required.
• Ability to simplify complex technical concepts into an easy-to-understand non-technical language to facilitate, communicate and interact with executives and business stakeholders
• Certifications in architecture, data engineering and development from Azure is preferred
• Knowledge of software configuration management environments and tools such as JIRA, Git, Jenkins, TFS, Shell, PowerShell, Bitbucket.

Data Specialization: :
• Lead, define and implement end-to-end modern data platforms on public cloud using 1st party services in support of analytics and AI use cases 
• Collaborate with enterprise architects, data architects, ETL developers & engineers, data scientists, and information designers to lead identification and definition of required data structures, formats, pipelines, metadata, and workload orchestration capabilities 
• Address aspects such as data privacy & security, data ingestion & processing, data storage & compute, analytical & operational consumption, data modeling, data virtualization, self-service data preparation & analytics, AI enablement, and API integrations 
• Be the technical liaison between customers and engineering teams 
• Be a big data evangelist by educating a variety of customers on the value of cloud and data services
• Ensure solutions are optimized for Azure’s ecosystem, utilizing services such as Azure Functions, Logic Apps, and Event Hubs.
• Leverage Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools like Terraform or Azure Resource Manager (ARM) for cloud resource management.
• Implement enterprise-grade security solutions using Azure Security Center, Azure Policy, and Azure Key Vault.
• Enforce data governance policies, including encryption standards, role-based access control (RBAC), and regulatory compliance (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA).
• Conduct risk assessments and remediate vulnerabilities across the Azure environment.
• Lead capacity planning and disaster recovery strategies to ensure uptime and business continuity.
• Partner with security teams to proactively remediate vulnerabilities and enforce role-based access control (RBAC).
• Act as a trusted advisor to clients, providing technical guidance on architecture improvements, cost optimizations, and emerging Azure features.
• Deliver detailed operational reports and improvement plans, ensuring continuous service enhancement.

General Consultancy: :
• Present recommendations to clients using both written deliverables and face-to-face discussions 
• Develop deep relationships with clients and act as the single point of contact for client executives on data engagements 
• Directly collaborate with the sales team to formulate and execute a sales strategy to facilitate the adoption of Azure data offerings.
• Lead the professional services elements of relevant data proposals and RFP/RFI responses, including scope, effort, pricing models and SOW development.  
• Guide customers during big data and cloud adoption by: 
• Understanding drivers of technology change 
• Building business cases to undertake technology change 
• Lead discovery sessions with stakeholders, including interviews, document analysis, requirements workshops, surveys, client on-site visits, business process descriptions, use cases, scenarios, and data analysis for technology change 
• Identify gaps in customer maturity and capabilities in relation to their data strategy. 
• Identify areas of opportunity, and recommend future state improvements  
• Work with Engagement / Project Managers to plan the delivery of data projects, including budget, delivery resources, partner engagement, schedules and responsibilities. 
• Accountable for the successful outcome of data and related engagements from both a delivery (schedule, deliverables etc.) and commercial (revenue realization, budget etc.) perspective. 
• Lead the effort to find creative approaches to problem solving and identify, mitigate, or escalate delivery risks and issues.

Certifications:
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (preferred).
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Security Engineer Associate (preferred).

Preferred Skills: :
• Experience with hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
• Knowledge of DevOps principles and CI/CD tools such as Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.
• Familiarity with advanced analytics, AI, and machine learning use cases on Azure.