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.