Lead Data Architect (Investment Management) - 4-Year Contract

About the role

A senior, hands-on Data Architect is sought to own the data design of investment management platforms, defining how investment data is sourced, ingested, structured, governed and made available across front, middle and back office. The role delivers solutions meeting MAS technology standards and Whole of Government compliance requirements. It sits in a four-person delivery team building a unified investment data architecture that enables generative AI use cases, and joins at the start of the build phase.

Key responsibilities

• Design conceptual, logical and physical data models for investment domains (security and reference data, positions and holdings, transactions, valuations, performance, benchmarks, risk, compliance, accounting and client reporting)
• Define golden-source, reference and master-data standards, including identifier strategy, entity resolution, schema versioning and change control
• Produce implementation artefacts: DDL, transformation and mapping specifications, interface contracts and data quality rules
• Define IBOR / ABOR data design and reconciliation points between investment and accounting books, with end-to-end auditability
• Design source-to-target flows centred on SimCorp Dimension, covering market and reference data vendors, custodians and downstream reporting
• Model unstructured content (research, news, market commentary) and define document ingestion, indexing, metadata, taxonomy and classification standards
• Define the vector database and embedding lifecycle, and hybrid retrieval combining vector similarity with keyword filtering and metadata ranking
• Define integration patterns for batch, API, messaging and event-driven exchange, and shape the target data platform (on-premise RDBMS/data warehouse and cloud lakehouse)
• Take part in platform upgrades, replatforming and data migration, owning mapping, parallel runs, cutover and reconciliation
• Develop the data-governance framework, data classification and access controls, and ensure designs meet MAS standards and Whole of Government compliance
• Lead design reviews, steer change proposals through the MAS Architecture Review Committee, and partner with portfolio management, operations, risk, finance, compliance and vendor teams

Required profile

• Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent experience
• At least 10 years of experience in data architecture, data modelling or senior data engineering, with substantial experience in investment management, asset management, institutional investment or capital markets
• Track record of delivering at least one large-scale data migration or platform replatforming programme in financial services
• Preferred: front-to-back investment management platforms, document parsing and OCR, market data vendors (Bloomberg, Refinitiv, ICE), private markets, ESG or multi-asset data, data mesh, and data foundations for retrieval-augmented generation

Required skills

• Modern data platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, Spark, Kafka, AWS or Azure, and containerised deployment (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Relational database design, preferably Oracle
• Data governance, lineage, metadata management and data quality frameworks
• Conceptual, logical and physical data modelling, including relational and dimensional modelling
• Vector search, embedding and hybrid retrieval
• Preferred: SQL, Python or Java