Senior Data Architect (Payments / Streaming / AWS)

🚀 Contract Opportunity – Senior Data Architect (Payments / Streaming / AWS)
📍 London (Hybrid – 2 days onsite)
📆 6-Month Contract | Start: 5th Jan 2026

We are looking for a Senior Data Architect to lead the design and delivery of high-scale, event-driven data platforms within a payments and financial services environment .

This is a hands-on architecture role for someone who can design, build, and guide delivery teams across streaming, lakehouse, and governance domains.

🔧 What You’ll Be Doing

Design Channel Ops Warehouse (30-day high-performance) and long-term Analytics Lake (7+ years)

Architect AWS lakehouse platforms using S3, Glue, Athena, Iceberg, Redshift

Build and evolve Kafka-based streaming pipelines (Confluent/MSK/Kinesis)

Define event contracts using Avro/Protobuf and Schema Registry

Lead As-Is to To-Be migrations from APIs, Files, SWIFT feeds, and Aurora Postgres

Establish data-as-a-product governance , quality SLAs, lineage, and access controls

Implement observability & FinOps dashboards (TPS, lag, cost per million events)

Ensure security by design (IAM, KMS, encryption, immutable audit)

Deliver production-grade code (Python/Scala/SQL) with CI/CD and IaC

✅ Must-Have Skills

Streaming & Event-Driven Architecture

Kafka (Confluent), AWS MSK/Kinesis/Firehose

Ordering, replay, idempotency, at-least/exactly-once semantics

EventBridge for event routing

Schema Management

Avro / Protobuf, Schema Registry, versioning & compatibility

AWS Data Stack

S3, Glue, Athena, Redshift, Lambda, Step Functions

Iceberg-ready lakehouse patterns

Payments Domain

ISO 20022 (PAIN / PACS / CAMT)

Payments lifecycle, reconciliation, statements

API / File / SWIFT channels

Data Architecture Fundamentals

Logical & physical data modelling (3NF/BCNF)

Dimensional, Data Vault, OLTP vs Analytics

CQRS, Event Sourcing, EDA, Domain-Driven Design

Delivery Excellence

Hands-on coding, performance profiling

Terraform, GitLab/Jenkins CI/CD

Automated testing, secure-by-design delivery

⭐ Nice-to-Have

QuickSight / Tableau

Redshift performance tuning

ksqlDB / Flink

Aurora PostgreSQL internals

API Gateway, mTLS, webhook patterns