Nelly Works
Principal Data Architect Data
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Job Description: Senior or Principal Architect
Our client is seeking a Senior or Principal level Architect to provide senior technical leadership across their Data practice and client engagements.
This is a highly technical, client-facing role for someone who can move comfortably between enterprise data architecture, hands-on technical execution, and strategic conversations with customers. You will own the end-to-end technical direction and successful delivery of complex engagements while helping define the standards, patterns, and capabilities that allow the engineering organization to scale.
Key Focus: You are close to GCP services, lead strong architecture solutions, and partner with the commercial team to win and deliver projects.
Responsibilities
- Act as the senior technical referent for complex Data engagements, owning key architecture decisions and ensuring successful technical delivery
- Work directly with clients to understand their business requirements, data landscape, and technical challenges, translating them into scalable solutions on Google Cloud
- Define architectures across data platforms, pipelines, modeling, integration, governance, security, and scalability
- Remain a hands-on technical practitioner, supporting engineering teams with complex implementation challenges and unblocking delivery when needed
- Develop estimates around the skills, resources, and timelines required to deliver engagements and translate these into clear technical proposals
- Partner closely with Data Engineers, Cloud Architects, and AI/ML teams to design solutions that integrate Cloud, Data, and AI capabilities
- Help establish and evolve architectural standards, reusable patterns, and engineering best practices across the Data practice
- Mentor and enable engineers and architects, helping raise the technical bar across the organization
- Support solutioning and pre-sales conversations, partnering with the commercial team to help customers understand both the technical approach and business value of proposed solutions
- Occasionally travel to meet clients, partners, and team members (conferences, offsites, client engagements)
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Required Qualifications
- Deep, hands-on experience designing and delivering enterprise-scale data architectures in complex cloud environments
- Strong expertise with the Google Cloud data ecosystem, particularly BigQuery and related GCP services
- Advanced SQL skills and strong Python proficiency
- Proven experience with modern data engineering and orchestration technologies (dbt, Cloud Composer, Airflow, and related tools)
- Experience designing scalable data platforms, pipelines, data models, and integration patterns
- Strong understanding of data governance, security, quality, lineage, and observability
- Ability to translate complex business and data requirements into a clear technical vision, architecture, and delivery roadmap
- Ability to move comfortably between high-level architectural thinking and hands-on technical execution
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and understanding of development best practices
- Experience leading large-scale data modernization and transformation initiatives
- Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence both engineering teams and senior client stakeholders
- Proven ability to work with commercial and sales teams to shape, pitch, and win projects
- Experience in professional services, consulting, or cloud partner environments is highly desirable
- Strong communication skills; ability to explain complex technical decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
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Location & Travel
- Based: UK, ideally London or Greater London
- Remote: Primarily remote, with flexibility for occasional travel to meet clients, partners, and team members (conferences, offsites, collaborative sessions)
About Nelly Works
Nelly Works is a specialist talent consultancy focusing in recruiting senior technical and commercial talent for high-growth deep tech, cloud and AI-focused organizations. We understand the nuances of building world-class teams and match exceptional talent with the right opportunities.
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