Enterprise Data Architect

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced Enterprise Data Architect based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The ideal candidate will oversee the complete Data Lakehouse architecture lifecycle, ensuring integration, governance, and consistency among data ingestion, storage, processing, and consumption layers, aligned with enterprise standards.

Key Responsibilities

• Take complete ownership of the end-to-end Data Lakehouse architecture, ensuring alignment across all layers including ingestion, processing, storage, consumption, and governance.
• Define and validate a target Medallion Architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold) that supports batch, near real-time, and historical data handling in compliance with enterprise architecture principles.
• Maintain architectural integrity and seamless platform integration involving Cloudera Data Platform, Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse, Informatica (ETL, Data Quality, Metadata), and Denodo for data virtualization.
• Evaluate and approve detailed low-level designs, data flows, and integration strategies across multiple platforms.
• Conduct a thorough architectural review of Phase 1 deliverables, including data pipelines, logical and physical data models, and gold layer aggregations, identifying gaps and defining remediation strategies in line with the target framework.
• Govern logical and physical data modeling adhering to Financial Services Logical Data Model (FSLDM) and FSAS aggregation standards, ensuring accuracy and reusability of models across enterprise and subject areas.
• Ensure the architecture complies with National Data Management Office (NDMO) guidelines, National Data Index (NDI), data classification, privacy, and security protocols, supporting regulatory reporting and data auditability.
• Establish architecture patterns to guarantee high availability (minimum 99.9%), horizontal scalability, disaster recovery, and data restoration.
• Guide performance tuning efforts for data ingestion, transformation, and reporting workloads to meet scalability and resilience standards.
• Engage with stakeholders across IT, Data Governance, Security, and business units, effectively communicating architectural decisions and participating in governance forums and design reviews.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Extensive expertise in Enterprise Data Architecture, including Enterprise Data Warehouse modernization, Data Lake/Lakehouse frameworks, and Medallion architecture patterns.
• In-depth knowledge of BFSI domain data models, particularly FSLDM and FSAS aggregation standards.
• Hands-on experience with Cloudera CDP components (HDFS, Spark, Hive, Kafka), Teradata Vantage, Informatica ETL and Power Exchange (CDC), Kafka, and Denodo.
• Proven experience developing governance-driven architectures addressing metadata, lineage, data quality, security, masking, and encryption.
• Strong familiarity with regulatory compliance and security standards in data platforms.
• Expertise in non-functional architecture aspects such as performance tuning, workload optimization, capacity planning, resilience, backup, and disaster recovery.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management capabilities with a track record of leading cross-vendor and cross-functional technical discussions.

Experience & Qualifications

• At least 15 years of experience in data architecture roles, preferably within large BFSI organizations.
• Documented success in delivering large-scale data platform transformations.
• Experience working in hybrid delivery environments involving both onsite and offshore teams.
• Preferably holds architecture certifications or advanced qualifications in data engineering.