Data Lead in Romsey

Great ideas come from different minds. That’s why we bring together engineers, scientists, analysts, and creatives from every background — and give them the trust, tools, and freedom to make a difference. What connects us is the mission: solving meaningful problems and building capability that protects what matters most. And as the challenges evolve, so do we — working on the technologies that will shape tomorrow, not just today.

About Roke: Roke offers specialist knowledge in sensors, communications, cyber, and AI and ML. We change the way organisations think and act – through dynamic insights from the analysis of multiple layers of data. We take care of the innovative, technical stuff that keeps everyone safe – that’s our mission, passion, and motivation.

The Opportunity: Roke is recruiting a Data Lead/ Data Architect who is driven by solving varied and interesting client problems. The candidate will be responsible for supporting the strategy, architecture and high-level design of data intensive solutions, and will also support Client Managers directly in a pre-sales capacity to develop relationships and solutions that can support future business growth.

For this specific role, we are seeking someone with strong experience in data strategy and governance, who can design and deliver data pipelines and data platforms for both structured and unstructured data applications. They will be supported by a team of data engineers to deliver on the strategy and designs.

The ideal candidate will have a passion for supporting the development of capability within their own technical area. This senior position will be pivotal to capability development through involvement with business development activities, supporting our account managers in the development of customer offerings to address market drivers, identifying opportunities to develop/exploit our own IP in our target proposition space, as well as understanding and documenting the customer’s requirements for distribution to the engineering team.

Areas of Responsibility/Tasks:

• Help Defence customers develop their strategy for data as a strategic asset and define the appropriate level of governance needed and the appropriate processes.
• Communicate the data strategy to non-technical stakeholders and technical experts.
• Define the architecture for data software and analytics solutions, either as standalone engagements or within a larger multi-disciplinary programme environment.
• Lead a team of data engineers, drive technology choices, and support them in delivering early-stage investigations through to large scale implementations.
• Support the Sales and Campaign functions to develop and foster client relationships and elaborate high level technical requirements.
• Work directly with multiple development teams, ensuring solutions meet all requirements of quality, security, modifiability, extensibility etc, by ensuring best engineering practices are followed.
• Represent Roke and its technical solutions and capabilities toward client communities.

Why We Want You: Beyond your technical skills, you will be proactive and able to communicate effectively with a variety of internal and external stakeholders. You will work well alone or as part of a team. You will be curious and seek out the best approach/solution/tool for the job at hand.

Essential skills/experience:

• Alongside your skills with data specific technologies, you have a broad technical background which allows you to rapidly understand new systems and domains, and prototype solutions based on your experience and hands on approach.
• As a Data Architect, you will have a degree level qualification in a STEM subject, or you will have an education and level of experience which is comparable.
• Experience of Data Architecture and Data Strategy in a UK Defence or other Public Sector context.
• Direct experience with data ingest, transformation and persistence technologies and good understanding of how they combine to build resilient data pipelines.
• Good understanding of structured and unstructured data, and the techniques needed to exploit them in different ways.
• Experience of working with Data and Software Engineers to provide deliverable solutions to complex data problems.
• Experience of managing teams within an Agile framework.
• Appreciation of the different approaches required when working with cloud solutions versus traditionally hosted systems.
• Experience of working with in Business Development and contributing to complex technical bids.
• Familiarity with Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment techniques, and the quality mechanisms that are required to support them.
• Experience of building Data Pipelines in a Cloud environment (Azure, AWS, GCP).
• Knowledge of commercial and contractual frameworks.
• Scrum-master and/or Product Owner experience.

Why You Should Join Us: Roke offer a competitive salary and access to a number of additional flexible benefits covering Health and Wellbeing, Savings and Protection & Life, Leisure and Entertainment. Roke has a great community of groups with shared interests across a wide range of domains. We are a people-first business, and fostering and developing the talent of our people is core to our continued success. Our approach to knowledge-sharing and interest groups enables people to share ideas and be passionate about tools, technologies & techniques, which interest them, supporting fulfilment and professional development. We are committed to a policy of Equal Opportunity, Diversity and Inclusion. Our working environment is friendly, creative and inclusive and supports a diverse workforce and those with additional needs.

Clearances: Due to the nature of this role, we require you to be eligible to achieve SC clearance. As a result, you should have resided in the U.K. for the last 5 years for SC.

The Next Step: Click apply, submitting an up-to-date CV. We look forward to hearing from you.