Solution Architect (Manchester)

Insight Investment is looking for a Solution Architect to join the Data Platform team in Manchester. This is a hands-on, delivery-focused role responsible for designing and implementing pragmatic, scalable solutions on top of Insight’s Snowflake-based Data Platform hosted in Microsoft Azure. Joining an established Data Platform team in the early stages of growing out solutions in Snowflake, the role focuses on turning platform intent and capability gaps into real, production-ready implementations that can scale with the organisation.

Sitting between Platform Architecture, Data Architecture, and delivery teams, the Solution Architect ensures that enterprise data management capabilities such as metadata management, lifecycle governance, auditability, and operational resilience are embedded into solutions from the outset. This is a delivery-adjacent role with accountability for ensuring platform capabilities are not just well designed, but usable, supportable, and actively adopted as the Snowflake platform matures.

• Design and deliver scalable, production-ready solutions that address platform capability gaps and business requirements, aligned to Snowflake on Azure and compliant with end-to-end SSDLC and enterprise technology change policies.
• Define and maintain reference architectures, solution patterns, and exemplar implementations to support adoption, ensure architectural transparency, and enable consistent use across teams.
• Work hands-on with delivery teams to validate and implement solution designs, acting as a technical authority on Snowflake and advising on appropriate best-practice approaches.
• Guide teams in selecting solution approaches that balance performance, maintainability, operability, and cost, improving the data engineering experience through reusable components and clear guidance.
• Shape platform capabilities for both technical and non-technical users, including Front Office financial services end users, through low-code, configuration-led, or metadata-driven solutions where appropriate.
• Contribute to the evolution of end-to-end data management capabilities, embedding discovery, governance, lifecycle management, operability, resilience, auditability, and observability into solution designs by default.
• Collaborate with architects, platform, security, and operations teams to ensure solutions meet production readiness, compliance, and assurance standards, and align with enterprise data governance, security, privacy, and audit expectations.
• Engage with delivery teams, data stewards, and subject-matter experts to ensure solutions align to overall platform direction and contribute to continuous improvement and communities of practice.

• Strong, hands-on experience with Snowflake, including core capabilities such as warehouses, tasks, streams, snowpipe, semi-structured data handling (variant type), file formats and stages, and platform features like RBAC, time-travel and cloning.
• Strong SQL skills, including performance-aware and Snowflake-optimised query design and features such as materialized views.
• Knowledge of snowpark, or transferable knowledge from other dataframe-based frameworks such as PySpark.
• Experience implementing batch data ingestion pipelines using technologies such as Azure Data Factory, Openflow or similar.
• Experience delivering data solutions on Snowflake hosted in Microsoft Azure.
• Practical understanding of how data solutions must align with enterprise concerns such as security, identity, CI/CD, and infrastructure-as-code, working effectively with platform and cloud engineering teams.
• Able to take ambiguous requirements and translate them into practical, production-ready solutions.
• Strong understanding of how design decisions impact delivery speed, operability, cost, and governance.
• Comfortable making and explaining architectural trade-offs in a delivery context.
• Works confidently across engineers, architects, Front Office users, and governance stakeholders, bridging strategy and delivery.
• Communicates complex technical concepts clearly and pragmatically.
• Brings empathy and an enablement mindset when working with delivery teams, supporting adoption and change.
• Outcome-focused and delivery-minded, able to work hands-on where needed while maintaining a platform-level perspective.

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. If you are a candidate with a disability, or are assisting a candidate with a disability, and require an accommodation to apply for one of our jobs, please email us at TalentAcquisition@InsightInvestment.com.

About Insight Investment: Insight Investment is a leading asset manager focused on designing investment solutions to meet its clients' needs. Founded in 2002, Insight's collaborative approach has delivered both investment performance and growth in assets under management. Insight manages assets across its core liability-driven investment, risk management, full-spectrum fixed income, currency and absolute return capabilities. Insight has a global network of operations in the UK, Ireland, Germany, US, Japan and Australia. More information about Insight Investment can be found at: https://www.insightinvestment.com/corporate/.