Senior Data Architect
Let's Write Africa's Story Together!
Old Mutual is a firm believer in the African opportunity and our diverse talent reflects this.
Job Description
You will form part of the Mass Foundation Cluster which is one of the largest customer-facing business segments in Old Mutual. Our vision is to be our customers' most trusted financial partner, passionate about helping them achieve their lifetime goals. Our mission is to enable positive futures for our customers, by bridging the gap between their resources and their financial service’s needs. Our primary goal is to facilitate access to financial solutions for our customers and to keep pace with their changing needs. Our target market is the low and emerging-middle income segment.The Senior Data Architect will play a critical leadership role in defining and guiding the target data architecture for the MFC BI landscape as the team transitions from the current Microsoft BI Stack and WPS-based warehouse environment towards a modern Databricks Lakehouse architecture on AWS. The role will be responsible for balancing current operational stability with future-state architecture design, ensuring that migration decisions address scalability, security, data governance, cost efficiency, reporting continuity, and decommissioning of legacy platforms.
Responsibilities:
Responsible for the development and execution of architectures, policies, practices and procedures that properly manage the full data lifecycle needs of an enterprise in order to ensure its coherence, availability, accuracy and security so that the information needs of the organization can be met. This includes data design, database architecture, metadata definition and repository creation.
Define and evolve the enterprise data architecture strategy, ensuring alignment with business objectives, governance standards, and technology roadmaps.
Lead the target architecture design for the migration of the current Microsoft BI and WPS data warehouse landscape to Databricks on AWS.
Design scalable, secure, and cost-efficient data platforms covering ingestion, transformation, storage, modelling, analytics, and reporting.
Establish architecture standards and best practices for data modelling, integration, governance, security, quality, and lineage.
Provide architectural leadership for Databricks Lakehouse solutions, including Delta Lake, data layering, orchestration, and consumption patterns.
Assess existing data assets, pipelines, warehouses, and reporting solutions, and define migration, modernisation, consolidation, or decommissioning strategies.
Partner with business stakeholders, product owners, engineers, cloud teams, and enterprise architects to deliver scalable and governed data solutions.
Ensure compliance with enterprise security, privacy, regulatory, and audit requirements across the data platform.
Drive architecture governance through solution reviews, target-state designs, architectural standards, and technology recommendations.
Mentor and guide data engineers, analysts, and technical teams on modern data architecture, cloud platforms, and data management best practices.
Collaborate with platform and cloud teams to optimise performance, scalability, reliability, and cost across AWS and Databricks environments.
Stay abreast of emerging technologies and recommend innovations that enhance the organisation's data and analytics capabilities.
Requirements:
5+ years of experience in data architecture, solution architecture, data engineering, or enterprise data management, including experience leading enterprise-scale data platform or data warehouse initiatives.
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Data Science, Engineering, or a related field.
Experience leading data warehouse, analytics platform, or cloud data modernisation initiatives.
Experience defining architecture standards, reference architectures, technology roadmaps, and governance frameworks.
Strong Microsoft BI experience, including SQL Server, SSIS, SSAS and SSRS.
AWS cloud data platform experience.
Strong data modelling capability, including Kimball, dimensional modelling and semantic modelling.
Practical understanding of Databricks Lakehouse architecture, including Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, data governance, workload orchestration, and modern data platform design patterns.
Experience with data governance, data quality, metadata, lineage and security.
Ability to produce architecture diagrams, target-state designs, decision papers and migration roadmaps.
Strong stakeholder engagement and technical leadership skills.
Experience with WPS is advantageous
Databricks certification.
AWS Solutions Architect Certification.
Financial services, insurance, regulatory reporting or customer analytics experience.
Experience with monitoring and observability tooling.
Experience with DevOps, CI/CD, Git, Terraform or Databricks deployment automation.
Skills
AWS Cloud Computing, Database Architecture, Data Governance, Data Warehousing (DW), Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI), Solution ArchitectureCompetencies
Education
Bachelors Degree (B) (Required)Closing Date
02 September 2026 , 23:59The appointment will be made from the designated group in line with the Employment Equity Plan of Old Mutual South Africa and the specific business unit in question.
The Old Mutual Story!