About Us:

We are a pioneering Data and AI-focused organisation within ADQ, a major sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi, UAE. With access to ADQ’s scale, funding, and portfolio ecosystem, we are building a next-generation data and AI capability designed to unlock measurable value across multiple industries.

Our Team:

Our team brings together global experience in technology, engineering, and entrepreneurship. We foster an environment where ambition, innovation, and high performance go hand in hand.

Role Overview:

As a Data Solution Architect, you will shape, design, and govern enterprise-grade cloud data platforms that span across the ADQ ecosystem.

While the role prefers deep experience in Microsoft Azure, you must bring broad, cloud-agnostic expertise across leading platforms such as AWS, GCP, Snowflake, Palantir Foundry, Databricks, and hybrid/on-prem ecosystems.

You will play a critical strategic role, working directly with senior executives, C-suite leaders, and technology decision-makers to define data roadmaps, influence architectural direction, evaluate emerging technologies, and guide enterprise-wide data strategy.

Responsibilities:

Strategic Leadership & Architecture

• Own and define the enterprise-wide cloud data architecture, ensuring scalability, security, interoperability, and future readiness.

• Influence C-suite leaders (CIO, CDO, CTO, business heads) on data strategy, AI adoption, roadmaps, and platform choices.

• Lead technology evaluation, solution selection, vendor comparison, and architecture governance.

• Translate complex architectural concepts into business value narratives for senior leadership.

• Ensure alignment between data strategy, enterprise architecture, and organisational goals.

Business & Functional Understanding

• Understand the broader organisation’s operating model, business functions, and strategic objectives.

• Map how the data platform can enable Finance, Operations, HR, Commercial, Risk, Legal, Procurement, Asset Management, and other functions.

• Drive cross-functional discussions that clarify business needs and convert them into scalable data solutions.
Platform, Pipeline, and Integration Architecture

• Design multi-cloud and hybrid ingestion, transformation, and orchestration architectures.

• Build scalable data processing using batch, streaming, event-driven, and API-based patterns.

• Ensure interoperability between Azure, AWS, GCP, Snowflake, Databricks, and Palantir ecosystems where required.
Data Modelling & Standards

• Lead enterprise data modelling standards across relational, dimensional, NoSQL, lakehouse, semantic, and operational domains.

• Define canonical data models and reusable patterns for portfolio-wide adoption.

Data Governance & Quality

• Shape enterprise governance frameworks: metadata, cataloguing, lineage, privacy, classification, access control, quality and retention.

• Guide stakeholders on regulatory compliance and data protection best practices.

Security & Compliance

• Architect security controls across multi-cloud environments: encryption, RBAC, network isolation, secrets management, tokenisation.

• Ensure compliance with UAE, GCC, and international data regulations.
Collaboration & Leadership

• Act as the senior technical partner for analysts, engineers, scientists, domain experts, and business leaders.

• Lead architecture reviews, solution assessments, and cross-functional decision-making.

• Mentor technical teams and elevate the organisation’s data engineering maturity.

Documentation & Knowledge Management

• Maintain detailed documentation on architecture, integration patterns, standards, and roadmaps.

Innovation & Continuous Improvement

• Continuously scan emerging tech trends in AI, LLMs, automation, MLops, data governance, and platform engineering.

• Recommend strategic improvements and future-state solutions aligned with organisational priorities.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or related fields (Master’s preferred).

• Overall 10+ years of IT experience, with 7+ years of experience in data architecture, with significant work in cloud-based solutions.

• Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders, including C-suite and board-level discussions.

• Experience delivering architectures for large enterprises or multi-business-unit environments.

Technical Expertise:

You must demonstrate a balanced mix of cloud and platform expertise across:

Cloud Platforms

• Microsoft Azure : Fabric, ADLS Gen2, Synapse, Data Factory, Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Azure Databricks

• AWS: S3, Glue, Redshift, EMR, Kinesis, Lake Formation

• GCP: BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataproc, Pub/Sub

Data & AI Platforms( including but not limited to)

• Snowflake (warehousing, Snowpark, data sharing, governance)

• Databricks (multi-cloud lakehouse, Delta Lake, ML ecosystem)

• Palantir Foundry (pipelines, ontologies, operational intelligence)

Governance & Metadata

• Purview, Collibra, Alation, Informatica EDC, or equivalent tools

• Data lineage, cataloguing, classification, tagging frameworks

Integration & Architecture

• Event-driven architectures (Kafka, Event Hub, Pub/Sub)

• API-first and microservices integration

• Hybrid integration patterns between on-prem and cloud

Security

• Key Vault / AWS KMS / GCP KMS

• RBAC frameworks

• Encryption and masking standards

Automation & DevOps

• IaC using Terraform, Bicep, ARM, CloudFormation

• CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, GitLab

• Orchestration using Airflow, ADF, Fabric Pipelines, or equivalent

Data Science & Machine Learning

• Azure ML, Sagemaker or Equivalent

BI & Analytics

• Power BI, Tableau, Qlik

• Enterprise semantic models, RLS, workspace governance

Disclaimer:

This job posting is not open to recruitment agencies. Any candidate profile submitted by a recruitment agency will be considered as being received directly from an applicant. Contango reserves the rights to contact the candidate directly, without incurring any obligations or liabilities for payment of any fees to the recruitment agency.