Senior Solution Big Data Architect

Role overview A senior architect position is open for a long-term remote contract based in the EU, supporting a banking client's enterprise data platform program. The role drives end-to-end solution architecture for large-scale distributed data, streaming, and integration workloads, with a particular focus on the Cloudera-on-AWS environment, Kafka-based real-time pipelines, and the broader evolution of the bank's data platform capabilities.

Responsibilities - Own solution architecture for distributed data, streaming, and integration solutions, from ingestion through to consumption. - Serve as lead architect across the Enterprise Data Lake, Operational Datastore, and related Cloudera CDP platform services running on AWS. - Design and document scalable patterns across Cloudera, Kafka, API, and cloud platforms, including processing, storage, and consumption layers. - Provide architectural oversight, design assurance, and governance across delivery teams, including review of technical designs and approval at architecture review boards. - Identify non-functional requirements, technical risks, dependencies, and design trade-offs, and support iterative delivery planning. - Shape architecture strategy, engineering standards, and best practices across the data platform ecosystem.

Requirements - 10+ years in IT with substantial experience delivering data platform, integration, or distributed systems projects. - Hands-on architecture experience with Kafka or equivalent event-streaming platforms, including consumer groups, offsets, partitioning, retries, and dead-letter handling. - Proven work designing solutions on Cloudera CDH/CDP or comparable enterprise distributed data platforms. - Strong grasp of batch and real-time processing, large-scale ingestion, transformation, and consumption patterns. - Background in complex enterprise environments with multiple systems, vendors, and governance processes. - Solid command of non-functional concerns: performance, scalability, resilience, security, observability, and operability.

Nice to have - Experience with Spark, Flink, Hive, Impala, or equivalent processing frameworks. - Java, Spring Boot, and REST service design experience. - Familiarity with HBase, Cassandra, or other distributed NoSQL stores. - AWS cloud services and DevOps, CI/CD, and observability tooling.

Benefits and work setup - Remote-first position within the EU. - Long-term contract with an initial purchase order running through December 2026, with an expected extension into 2027. - October start date.