Data Architect/Modeller

Job Type:  12 month FTC

Closing Date: 25th November 

Location: London or Edinburgh

Salary and benefits: Up to £80,000 dependant on experience, discretionary bonus,  private medical cover, 38 days annual leave, up to 12% employer pension contribution, 12x salary life assurance, career breaks, income protection, 3x volunteering days and much more! 

Flexible working: All roles are open to part-time, job-share and other types of flexibility. We will discuss what is important to you and balancing this with business requirements during the recruitment process. You can read more about flexible working here.

Who are we? 

We’re Standard Life, a retirement specialist focused entirely on retirement savings and income. We champion the belief that everyone’s journey to and through retirement can be better, and for more than 200 years, we’ve been helping our customers plan and prepare for their financial futures.

Life today is increasingly complicated, uncertain and unpredictable. People move through different careers, face unexpected moments and navigate important choices. We offer our colleagues flexibility, trust and benefits that work for whatever life brings. In return we expect curiosity, connection, accountability and high standards. We make room for what matters - so you can bring your best, every day.

We have an incredible opportunity to join us here at Standard Life as a Data Architect/Modeller in our IT Transformation team within the Retirement Solutions and Asset Management function. 

Accountable for the delivery of Asset Management's technology strategy through a significant period of transformation and enabling a suitable support model for a mature Asset Management function which is core to the success of the wider Standard Life Group.

Key responsibilities

• Designing, building and reverse engineering data models and metadata systems

• Help delivery teams to interpret business needs and transpose these into scalable data models

• Provide oversight and advice to other architects and engineers within RS&AM who are undertaking the design and build of data models and technology solutions

• Support engineering teams by communicating your data models in order for efficient delivery within an agile framework

• Understanding and communication of different types of data models for different purposes to support the delivery of data solutions ranging from master data management systems to reporting data marts

• Knowledge of how best to design data platforms to the strengths of market leading technologies such as AWS S3/lambda and Snowflake

• Design data platforms which cater for different business areas, drawing links between problems to reach common solutions. 

• Design of semantic models in Snowflake for AI use cases or for use in Power BI solutions

• Effective communication with a variety of stakeholders, supporting and hosting discussions within a multidisciplinary team, with potentially difficult dynamics. 

• Demonstrate awareness that data needs to be aligned to the needs of the end user, and production of logical and physical models which align to specific end user needs.

• Undertaking data profiling and source system analysis, and present clear insights to colleagues to support the end use of the data. 

• Support for and understanding of what data governance is required and where, and taking an active role for the assurance of data solutions with recommendations to ensure compliance. 

• Active participation in architectural governance forums and working groups and ability to support multiple projects simultaneously through design authorities 

• Supporting the creation and on-going management of data dictionaries (business/technical)

• Providing input and enforcement of the information standards policy. Highlighting deficiencies and improving upon where required

• Promoting the availability of data from corporate systems over manual curation. Record and catalogue where manual tasks exist and opportunities to automate are available

• Collaborating with delivery teams, Data Architects and Data Governance to effectively prioritise your activities

What we're looking for

Essential

• Experience of Financial Services, and specifically within Asset Management

• Excellent working knowledge of standard data modelling tools (e.g. Erwin)

• Experience with datasets relating to investment, asset data, including derivatives

• Good stakeholder management and engagement skills

• Knowledge of Agile methodologies and tooling to support agile delivery of projects (e.g. Jira/Confluence)

• Understanding of Data Warehouse and/or Data Lake and/or Data Lakehouse

• Experience with multiple data storage types and technologies in data warehouse and data lake solutions and how to model data for efficient usage of them. Examples include relational DBMS (e.g. Postgress, Oracle ), Columnar DBs (E.g. Amazon Redshift, Snowflake), cloud object storage (E.g. Amazon S3)

• Understanding of architecture and design concepts for ETL/ELT solutions utilising a range of tooling 

• Understanding of architecture and design concepts for data exploitation solutions and technologies includes Analytics (E.g. R & Python), Reporting (E.g. Quicksight, Tableau, Qlik, Power BI) & APIs

• Demonstrable expertise in the areas of data modelling in large complex IT estates, implementation of multiple data architectures and integration of Data Management/Governance tooling

• Experience in modern ways of working (examples include Agile, CI/CD, DevOps, Test Automation)

• Excellent communication, influencing and facilitation skills, in particular for problem solving and troubleshooting activities

• Assertiveness in dealing with people at all levels within and outside of the delivery organisation

• Issue management, prioritisation and ability to provide pragmatic direction which is consistent with clients' longer-term strategy

• Able to demonstrate resilience, flexibility and adapt to changing schedules and priorities

Desirable

• Membership of a professional body

• Degree in Computer Science, Technology or Engineering

Personal Attributes

• Customer focused with an attitude to deliver excellent customer outcomes through technical expertise

• Problem solving, analytics and resolution skills

• Strong verbal and written communication skills

• Demonstrated ability to communicate effectively across teams

• Ability to operate in cross-functional and multidisciplinary teams

• Ability to learn new technologies. Continuously strives to learn and make time for self-development.

We want to hire the whole version of you.

We are committed to ensuring that everyone feels accepted and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. If your experience looks different from what we’ve advertised and you believe that you can bring value to the role, we’d love to hear from you. 

 If you require any adjustments to the recruitment process, please let us know so we can help you to be at your best. 

We’re reviewing applications as they come in, so apply early to avoid missing out.

Find out more about working at Standard Life

• Guide for Candidates: standardlifeplc.pagetiger.com/guideforcandidates
• Find or get answers from our colleagues: www.standardlifeplc.com/careers/talk-to-us

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