Job Description Summary

Senior Staff Software Architect to define and drive the data architecture and strategy for our customer-facing digital platform. This is a hands-on architecture role responsible for building a reliable, scalable and high-performance data foundation spanning data ingestion, ETL, relational data stores, search/indexing and the API serving layer. You will shape how data flows from multiple enterprise sources into Amazon RDS/PostgreSQL and Apache Solr, and how that data is efficiently exposed to customer-facing applications.

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Job Description

Role & Responsibilities:

Define and drive the long-term data architecture and technology strategy for the platform, design scalable patterns for data ingestion, transformation, ETL and data synchronisation across multiple source systems.
Own the architecture and optimisation strategy for Apache Solr, including indexing, search performance and efficient retrieval of large datasets.
Provide application-level database architecture leadership for Amazon RDS/PostgreSQL, including data modelling, schema design, indexing, query optimisation and database design patterns.
Define how data should move across source systems → ETL → RDS → Solr → APIs → web applications.
Drive adoption of AI-assisted software engineering and AI Development Lifecycle (AI-DLC) practices to improve developer productivity, quality, automation and speed of delivery.
Define and drive the platform's Generative AI and Agentic AI strategy, identifying opportunities to build intelligent capabilities into customer-facing products.
Drive strategies for data quality, integrity, traceability, monitoring, logging and auditing.
Identify performance bottlenecks across database, indexing, search and API layers and lead optimisation initiatives.
Partner closely with Product Owners, Business Analysts, regional stakeholders, architects and engineering teams to translate product needs into scalable technical solutions.
Mentor Tech Leads and senior engineers on database, data integration and search architecture.

Technical Exterties

Data & Database Architecture

Deep hands-on experience with PostgreSQL and relational database architecture.
Strong expertise in data modelling, schema design, indexing, query optimisation and database performance tuning.
Experience with Amazon RDS and cloud-based database architectures.
Ability to operate as an Application DBA/Database Architect, helping engineering teams make sound database design and optimisation decisions.

Search & Indexing

Strong hands-on expertise with Apache Solr or comparable enterprise search platforms.
Deep understanding of indexing strategies, search architecture, query performance and large-scale data retrieval.
Experience designing architectures that combine relational databases with search/indexing platforms.

Data Integration

Strong experience designing ETL/ELT and data integration architectures.
Experience integrating data from multiple enterprise systems and designing reliable data pipelines.
Strong understanding of data synchronisation, transformation, validation and error-handling patterns.

Application & Cloud Architecture

Experience designing data services and APIs supporting high-volume customer-facing web applications.
Strong experience with AWS, particularly RDS, S3, Lambda and related data services.
Understanding of Node.js, GraphQL and API architectures and how application design affects database and search performance.
Strong understanding of monitoring, logging, observability, security, reliability, availability, scalability and performance engineering.

AI Adoption

Practical knowledge of Generative AI, large language models, AI agents and Agentic AI architectures.
Passion for applying AI to both customer-facing products and the software engineering lifecycle.

Education & Experience

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
15+ years of software engineering/data engineering experience, with significant experience in data architecture and technical leadership.
Proven experience designing data platforms for large-scale customer-facing applications.
Demonstrated ability to influence architecture and engineering practices across multiple teams.
Strong communication skills with the ability to collaborate effectively with both technical teams and product/business stakeholders.

Senior Staff Enterprise Architect