Data Architect (Manchester)

Insight Investment is looking for a Data Architect to join the Data Platform team in Manchester. The Data Architect is responsible for defining, owning, and evolving the enterprise data architecture across the organisation’s data estate. This role ensures that data structures are coherent, governable, scalable, and aligned to business meaning, enabling delivery teams to build high‑quality data products with confidence.

Positioned within the Data Platform team, the Data Architect will provide crucial support to data engineers working in solution‑aligned product teams. This collaborative approach ensures that data architecture expertise is available across multiple delivery streams, fostering consistency and quality throughout the organisation's data landscape.

The Data Architect acts as a bridge between knowledgeable engineers and the business, working closely with Data Stewards, Data Owners and Data Consumers to ensure that business semantics, domain concepts, and canonical definitions are consistently reflected in logical and physical data models.

• Own and maintain the physical data architecture across the core data estate, including schemas, tables, views, and modelling standards.
• Design and evolve conceptual, logical, and physical data models across core business and investment domains.
• Define and maintain canonical data models and shared entity definitions to support consistent cross domain reporting and analytics.
• Work closely with Data Stewards to define and maintain business vocabularies, canonical definitions, and domain concepts.
• Collaborate with Data Owners and Data Consumers to ensure data models accurately reflect agreed business meaning and usage.
• Translate business concepts into logical and physical data structures that can be reliably implemented by engineering teams.
• Act as a translator between business stakeholders and engineers, reducing ambiguity and rework caused by inconsistent interpretation of data.
• Define and maintain data architecture standards, modelling conventions, and reference patterns.
• Provide clear architectural guardrails that enable teams to deliver quickly while maintaining consistency and quality.
• Partner with engineering teams to ensure solutions align with agreed data architecture principles.
• Collaborate with governance and risk functions to ensure data designs are auditable, well documented, and compliant with organisational standards.

• Demonstrable understanding of core asset‑management concepts and how they are represented as data, including financial instruments, transactions, positions and holdings, portfolios, benchmarks, pricing, reference data, and legal entities.
• Strong experience in conceptual, logical, and physical data modelling, with the ability to select appropriate modelling approaches based on use case and context.
• Proven ability to design and maintain enterprise and canonical data models spanning multiple business domains.
• Practical experience with dimensional and consumption‑oriented models for analytics and reporting.
• Ability to apply Data‑as‑a‑Product principles when defining data assets, including clear purpose, ownership, consumers, and quality expectations.
• Experience defining data architecture standards, patterns, and guardrails, and guiding teams through their adoption.
• Solid understanding of data governance, metadata, lineage, and regulatory expectations in a regulated environment.
• Experience working with modern data platforms, including cloud data warehouses and lakehouse architectures, from a data‑architecture and modelling perspective.
• Strong SQL and relational modelling foundations.
• Familiarity with data integration patterns, analytical data use cases, and layered data architectures (e.g. raw, curated, consumption).
• Clear understanding of how modelling and architectural decisions impact cost, performance, scalability, and operability, and able to articulate and document associated trade‑offs.
• Able to work confidently with engineers, architects, data stewards, data owners, and non‑technical stakeholders, acting as a bridge between business meaning and technical implementation.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain data structures, semantics, and architectural trade‑offs clearly.
• Consultative and influential, able to guide without direct authority.
• Pragmatic and outcome‑focused, comfortable balancing strategic intent, delivery realities, and cost considerations.

Insight is committed to being an inclusive employer and encourages applications from all suitably qualified applicants irrespective of background, circumstances, age, disability, gender identity, ethnicity, religion or belief and sexual orientation.