Senior Information Architect-London

Position Overview: The Senior Information Architect sits within Northern Trust’s Information Architecture team, shaping the firm’s enterprise data strategy, data modelling standards, and AI‑enabled capabilities. The role will provide design authority and governance across conceptual, logical, and physical data models, operating across the firm’s cloud data platforms and contributing to AI‑driven data products.

Responsibilities:

• Design and govern conceptual, logical, and physical data models aligned to the firm’s data mesh and medallion architectures.
• Maintain the enterprise data model library in SqlDBM, enforcing naming conventions, domain standards, and versioning.
• Define and steward canonical data entities and lineage across source, integration, and consumption layers.
• Translate business requirements into rigorous data structures in collaboration with engineering and domain teams.
• Guide teams on the design and effective use of semantic data models, including their application to agentic AI solutions.
• Integrate semantic layers with business glossaries, data catalogues, and lineage tooling.
• Design and maintain semantic models to support agentic‑AI capabilities; develop ontologies, taxonomies, and controlled vocabularies underpinning enterprise metadata and search.
• Define semantic modelling standards and patterns to ensure consistent meaning, interoperability, and AI readiness across data products.
• Control the creation of data domains aligned with the bank’s underlying capabilities.
• Design data product schemas across Snowflake and Databricks (Delta Lake), including access patterns.
• Define and enforce architectural guardrails for data product design (performance, scalability, security, cost efficiency).
• Embed data contract standards and data quality frameworks across pipeline outputs.
• Leverage Snowflake Cortex / Databricks Genie or similar to help engineering teams deliver natural language query and LLM‑augmented data products.
• Utilize GitHub Copilot (or similar) to accelerate modelling, documentation, and pipeline development.
• Design and define a set of agentic skills that can be provided to implementation teams.
• Contribute to the firm’s AI Champion network, evaluating emerging capabilities and advising on adoption.
• Act as the design authority for data architecture across teams and data domains.
• Partner with enterprise, security, and risk architecture to ensure solutions align with technology and regulatory standards.
• Provide early‑stage architectural input to initiative discovery and solution design to reduce delivery risk.
• Present architecture decisions to senior stakeholders, architecture review boards, and regulatory audiences.
• Support regulatory compliance through robust lineage, metadata management, and data quality evidence.
• Mentor junior architects and engineers within the Information Architecture community of practice.

Qualifications:

• Proven experience in data architecture, data engineering, or information management.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Science, Engineering, or a related discipline.
• Proven enterprise data modelling experience at conceptual, logical, and physical levels.
• Hands‑on SqlDBM experience (or equivalent modern toolset).
• Proven experience with dbt Labs.
• Good Python skills, API integration, automation.
• Practical Snowflake and Databricks experience, including Cortex AI and Genie.
• Working knowledge of OWL, RDF, SPARQL and enterprise ontology design.
• Experience with at least one agentic AI framework.
• GitHub Copilot or equivalent AI coding assistant experience in a professional setting.
• Financial services background preferred; BCBS 239 awareness advantageous.
• Desirable: Data Vault 2.1 alongside Kimball/Star‑schema modelling.
• Data mesh, data product ownership and federated governance.
• Knowledge graph platforms (Neo4j, Neptune) or knowledge of OWL, RDF and exposure to building ontologies.
• Published thought leadership or community contributions in data or AI.