Principal Architect, Data

About this Role

We are looking for a Principal Architect, Data to provide senior technical leadership across our Data practice and client engagements.

This is a highly technical, client-facing role for someone who can move comfortably between enterprise data architecture, hands-on technical execution, and strategic conversations with customers.

At Zencore, Principal Architects are senior technical leaders and the external face of our engineering expertise. They own the end-to-end technical direction and successful technical delivery of complex engagements, while helping define the standards, patterns, and capabilities that allow our engineering organization to scale.

Location: We are looking for candidates in the UK (London Preferred)

Responsibilities

- Act as the senior technical referent for complex Data engagements, owning key architecture decisions and ensuring successful technical delivery.

- Work directly with clients to understand their business requirements, data landscape, and technical challenges, translating them into scalable solutions on Google Cloud.

- Define architectures across data platforms, pipelines, modeling, integration, governance, security, and scalability.

- Remain a hands-on technical practitioner, supporting engineering teams with complex implementation challenges and unblocking delivery when needed.

- Develop estimates around the skills, resources, and timelines required to deliver Zencore engagements and translate these into clear technical proposals.

- Partner closely with Data Engineers, Cloud Architects, and AI/ML teams to design solutions that connect Zencore’s Cloud, Data, and AI capabilities.

- Help establish and evolve architectural standards, reusable patterns, and engineering best practices across the Data practice.

- Mentor and enable engineers and architects, helping raise the technical bar across the organization.

- Support solutioning and pre-sales conversations when deep Data expertise is required, helping customers understand both the technical approach and business value of the proposed solution

Qualifications

- Deep experience designing and delivering enterprise-scale data architectures in complex cloud environments.

- Strong hands-on experience with the Google Cloud data ecosystem, particularly BigQuery.

- Advanced SQL skills and strong experience with Python.

- Strong experience with modern data engineering and orchestration technologies such as dbt, Airflow / Cloud Composer, and related tools.

- Experience designing scalable data platforms, pipelines, data models, and integration patterns.

- Strong understanding of data governance, security, quality, lineage, and observability.

- Ability to translate complex business and data requirements into a clear technical vision, architecture, and delivery roadmap.

- Ability to move comfortably between high-level architectural thinking and hands-on technical execution.

- Strong software engineering fundamentals and understanding of development best practices.

- Experience leading large-scale data modernization and transformation initiatives.

- Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence both engineering teams and senior client stakeholders.

- Experience in professional services, consulting, or cloud partner environments is highly desirable.

- Strong communication skills and the ability to explain complex technical decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Why work at Zencore?

- We Are Trusted Experts: Our teams bring deep, hands-on experience to solve the hardest cloud and AI challenges.

- We Value Candor: We share unbiased opinions and aren't afraid of hard truths—our clients view us as true subject matter experts.

- We Are the Missing Link: We connect our enterprise clients directly to Google Cloud innovation, moving with agility where larger consultancies stall out.

- We Remove Uncertainty: We bring structured playbooks that eliminate risk from complex cloud migrations and AI deployments.

- We Show Empathy: We build lasting client trust because we understand the real-world operational complexities of enterprise technology.