Data Architect

Data Architect

Data Architects at Next, work closely with the Next Architect teams to identify potential technology innovations, make recommendations that support businesses growth and drive efficiencies, align business requirements with Next strategy and are responsible for designing, managing, and deploying an organisation’s data and analytics infrastructure. The position requires strong problem-solving skills, detailed knowledge of corporate and legal data standards, and an understanding of information systems. The Data Architect is also expected to plan and manage their own work efficiently.

About the Team

An Architect at Next Technology, is an IT specialist with a focus on the enterprise IT design, implementing complex solutions and specifying the design of services that support IT strategy, organisational roadmaps and Next Technology Solutions standards.

About the Role

• Set technical direction and roadmap for the data platform (Data Engineering and Analytics) and provide technical leadership in collaboration with key technical and business stakeholders.
• Define, document, share (explain/present) and maintain solution architectures and high level design patterns for the data platform in alignment with organisational goals and objectives.
• Own the creation of data best practices and standards in collaboration with technical stakeholders.
• Maintain a good high level knowledge of data engineering principles, data science and machine learning concepts.
• Share technical knowledge of the data platform with technical and business stakeholders.
• Work in collaboration with technical and business stakeholders to identify and define platform business requirements and convert these requirements into clear technology designs.
• Collaborate with Architects from other domains/areas to develop and evolve architecture practices within the organisation.
• Provide oversight of projects to ensure they conform to Next enterprise architecture principles, security standards and non-functional requirements.

About you

• Excellent verbal communication and customer facing skills.
• Takes initiative to advance own learning and professional development.
• Extensive experience building/designing enterprise scale data platforms for data ingestion, data processing, data transformation, business intelligence, AI and advanced analytics.
• Proven hands-on capability with relevant technology: Azure Platform, Azure Data Services, Databricks, Power BI, SQL DW, Snowflake, Big Query and Advanced Analytics. 
• Proven ability to understand low-level data engineering solutions and languages (Spark, MPP, Python, Delta, Parquet).
• Experience with Azure DevOps & CICD processes, software development lifecycle including infrastructure as code (Terraform)
• Understand data warehousing concepts, including dimensional modelling, star schema, data aggregation and best practices for designing efficient and scalable data models.
• Excellent documentation and diagramming skills
• Technical Cloud Certification preferred e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services or Google.
• Knowledge and experience of data processing patterns (ETL, ELT, Batch, Streaming).

 

You know Next, but did you know we’re a FTSE-100 retail company employing over 35,000 people across the UK and Ireland. We’re the UK’s 2nd largest fashion retailer and for Kidswear we’re the market leader. At the last count we have over 500 stores, plus the Next Online and it’s now possible to buy on-line from over 70 countries around the world! So we’ve gone global!