Overview of role

Duties, Responsibilities & Person Specification

• Be seen as a leader in all IT projects and, enterprise strategy, on areas related to data, BI and reporting.
• Translate Walkers' data strategy into executable data architecture roadmaps ensuring that the solutions in the roadmap directly align with business objectives.
• Partner with stakeholders (business leaders, data analyst, engineers) to align architecture with data governance, analytics and operational needs.
• Define and drive forward the firm’s adoption of data driven decision making. This would include driving proposals for new data driven revenue streams and reporting.
• Own the refinement and continuous refresh of Walkers' existing data strategy to adapt to business demands.
• Provide clear, continuous, and consistent data architecture leadership at all levels of project delivery lifecycles. This would include high-level data architecture assurance and low-level/detailed design guidance.
• Architect data-orientated solutions across multi-cloud and on-prem environments. This would include solutions for data lake-houses, master data management and metadata management.
• Design and maintain enterprise data models (conceptual, logical and physical) across transactional, analytical and operational systems.
• Establish reference architecture for data ingestion, transformation, storage and consumption.
• Support initiatives from a data perspective, ensuring that these help to build towards an overall future-state data architecture.
• Work with the Applications and Database team to help drive adoption of best data related practices.
• Create and maintain architectural documentation as artefacts that relate to data and analytics such as architectural designs, patterns, principles and standards and technology selection.
• Provide necessary artifacts and inputs to complete the data architecture/design sections of an overall solution design owned by project architects and present them to design governance forums.
• Create and own the firm’s standard non-functional requirements for all data related projects and technology selections.
• Collaborate with data stewards and compliance teams to ensure adherence to regulatory standards (e.g., GDPR). This would also include providing guidance/advice on information management best practices.
• Continual research on data technology, management and working practices to remain abreast of developments in across the IT industry in multiple verticals and not just Legal.
• Act as a bridge between business vision and engineering execution.

Education, Skills & Experience

• University degree in Computer Science or other relevant discipline or relevant IT experience
• ToGAF 9 or higher certified.
• Experience of working with wide variety of data - structured, semi structured & unstructured - and associated data sources.
• Previous experience as a Data Architect building and executing a data strategy.
• Deep knowledge of the data architecture lifecycle, from concept to deployment and consumption.
• Hands-on experience in contextual data modelling, entity relationship modelling, logical & physical data modelling and data lake design.
• Proven experience in architecting enterprise-ready data warehouse, data lakehouse, and master data management solutions.
• Deep hands-on experience in architecting enterprise data platforms using Azure-native components and data services. This would include but not limited to :
  • Azure Synapse Analytics for data warehousing and big data analytics
  • Azure data lake Gen1/Gen2
  • Azure Data factory for ETL/ELT, hybrid data integration and pipelines
  • Azure Databricks for data processing and analytics
  • Azure CosmosDB, Azure Table Storage and Azure Blob Storage
  • Microsoft Fabric
  • Azure Purview for data governance
  • among others.
• Proven experience in designing, implementing and integrating data management platforms for data cataloguing, classification and metadata management.
• Experience of integrating 3rd party platforms like Profisee, Semarchy, CluedIn and/or Reltio with Azure Purview and other Azure-native data-services.
• Good understanding of cloud networking architecture, operations, automation and cost management in context of data-orientated solutions.
• Experience with working with accounting and finance systems preferably in a Law firm or professional services firm.
• Experience in leveraging APIs for system-to-system data integration.
• Knowledge and experience of working with Azure-native AI and ML services, as part of enterprise data solutions and platforms.
• Proven experience in establishing, owning and managing an enterprise data model of various data domains including but not limited to HR, Marketing, Finance, Client and Documents.
• Knowledge of applicable data privacy practices and laws.

Personal and Professional Requirements

• Ability and willingness to occasionally work outside normal working hours/days when requested.
• Decisive and confident in one’s own ability and recommendations
• An understanding that occasional international business travel will be necessary
• Strong written, oral and presentation communication skills.
• Excellent inter-personal skills and ability to present ideas and proposals in user-friendly language
• A passion for continually staying up to date and evaluating where new technology can add value to the business.
• Highly self-motivated and directed, with keen attention to detail.
• Trusted advisor with the ability to step in and help support teams in advice and consultancy when necessary.
• Able to effectively prioritize tasks in a high-pressure environment.
• Experience working in a geographically dispersed team-oriented, collaborative environment.

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