About the role
Reporting to the Senior Director of Architecture, the Director of Architecture: Data is a new leadership role responsible for defining and executing our data architecture vision, and for building and leading a team of data architects (Associate Architect, Architect and Senior Architect) to deliver it.
This role combines people leadership, strategic architectural direction, and hands-on technical oversight. You will be the primary architect and champion of our data mesh transition, guiding the migration away from our current data warehouse and ODS model toward a distributed, domain-oriented architecture with clear data products, interoperable standards, and federated governance.
You will foster architectural excellence through mentorship, talent development, and clear technical governance. You will help your team balance innovation with pragmatism, align technical decisions with business outcomes, and maintain consistent architecture practices across our product lines.
Success in this role depends on building strong working relationships across the leadership team, particularly with the Senior Director of Data Products, the Head of Data Platform and the Head of Data Governance. The first strategic aim will be ensuring the transition to data mesh is well aligned, jointly owned, and sustained across product, platform, and governance boundaries.
Key responsibilities
Build, lead, and grow a team of data architects, providing mentorship, technical direction, and career development.
Define and own the target-state data architecture for the team, establishing data mesh principles including domain-oriented ownership, data as a product, self-serve data infrastructure, and federated computational governance as the standard operating model.
Collaborate with key stakeholders to identify and prioritize the most valuable data products and outcomes.
Lead the strategy and execution for migrating away from the current centralized data warehouse and operational data store model toward a distributed, data product-based architecture.
Ensure data domains and assets are clearly structured, connected and aligned across the organisation, avoiding duplication, conflicting definitions, and siloed solutions.
Partner with business stakeholders to understand decision-making needs and translate these into scalable, outcome-driven data domain designs.
Work closely with engineering and platform teams to guide implementation, ensuring alignment with enterprise platforms (e.g. Snowflake), integration patterns, and data cataloguing requirements.
Establish and promote standards for data modelling, data product design, and interoperability, enabling consistency across federated domain teams while supporting flexibility where needed.
Set clear technical governance for the architecture team, ensuring decisions balance innovation with pragmatism and align with business outcomes.
Contribute to and help shape our data strategy and roadmap, embedding architectural considerations that support long-term scalability and value.
Represent data architecture in senior technology and business forums, building alignment and buy-in for the data mesh transition.
Requirements
Proven experience leading, building and mentoring a team of architects or senior technical staff, with a genuine interest in developing people and talent.
The experience and confidence to be able to make decisions and act without exhaustive analysis, then to learn, rethink, and pivot if required.
Experience designing and implementing data architectures in complex, enterprise environments, ideally with a mix of central and federated models.
Direct experience with, or strong working knowledge of, data mesh principles and/or leading a migration from a traditional data warehouse/ODS model to a distributed, domain-oriented architecture.
Strong understanding of data modelling, data integration, data lifecycle, and data platforms (e.g. Snowflake), with the ability to engage effectively with technical teams.
Hands on experience with technical tooling and code development experience
Knowledge of semantic layers, graphs, and ontologies
Experience and curiosity around AI-powered development.
Ability to translate business needs into clear data design, with a focus on enabling decision-making and delivering measurable business outcomes.
Experience with data governance, master data management, and data quality concepts, and how these are enabled through architecture.
Strong stakeholder engagement and influencing skills, with the ability to work across business and technology teams and drive alignment in a matrix environment.
Ability to balance strategic thinking with pragmatic delivery, ensuring solutions are both scalable and achievable.
Experience leading large-scale data-led transformation initiatives.
Why join us?
Join our team and contribute to a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence. If you are ready to advance your career and make a significant impact, we encourage you to apply.
Work in a way that works for you
We promote a healthy work/life balance across the organization. We offer an appealing working prospect for our people. With numerous wellbeing initiatives, shared parental leave, study assistance and sabbaticals, we will help you meet your immediate responsibilities and your long-term goals.
Working flexible hours - flexing the times when you work in the day to help you fit everything in and work when you are the most productive.
Working for you
We know that your well-being and happiness are key to a long and successful career. These are some of the benefits we are delighted to offer:
Comprehensive Pension Plan
Home, office, or commuting allowance.
Generous vacation entitlement and option for sabbatical leave
Maternity, Paternity, Adoption and Family Care leave
Flexible working hours
Personal Choice budget
Internal communities and networks
Various employee discounts
Recruitment introduction reward
Employee Assistance Program (global)
About the business –
A global leader in information and analytics, we help researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society. Building on our publishing heritage, we combine quality information and vast data sets with analytics to support visionary science and research, health education and interactive learning, as well as exceptional healthcare and clinical practice. At Elsevier, your work contributes to the world’s grand challenges and a more sustainable future. We harness innovative technologies to support science and healthcare to partner for a better world.
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- We know your well-being and happiness are key to a long and successful career. We are delighted to offer country specific benefits. Click here to access benefits specific to your location.
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