Burberry Data Platform Architect

About Burberry

Burberry Limited, a quintessentially British luxury fashion house, is renowned for its innovative designs and commitment to quality. As part of the global luxury conglomerate, Burberry offers a dynamic and inclusive work environment where creativity and excellence are at the forefront. The company is dedicated to fostering a culture that encourages diversity and sustainability, making it a leader in the luxury industry.

Role & Responsibilities

• Design and maintain the platform's technical architecture, including compute/storage design, ingestion frameworks, access control, performance tuning, and capacity planning
• Define and maintain architectural standards and guardrails covering naming conventions, environment management, deployment pipelines, partitioning strategies, and cost optimisation patterns
• Own platform cost modelling and FinOps governance, defining cost allocation patterns and identifying optimization opportunities
• Align with the Data Senior Solution Architect and Data Solution Architects to ensure consistency with enterprise data architecture and models
• Translate architectural direction into practical engineering guidance for Data Platform Engineers and Data Engineers
• Design data ingestion architecture (batch, micro-batch, and streaming) with clear boundaries for system-to-system integration
• Define architecture for the semantic layer and self-serve analytics infrastructure
• Provide input to data squads for complex data products and support Data Product Managers and Data Engineers where architectural complexity requires it
• Ensure architecture supports emerging requirements, including agentic AI data infrastructure, MLOps productionisation, and advanced analytics
• Collaborate with Senior Manager, Data Platform Engineering to ensure platform operations are aligned to the target architecture
• Collaborate with Senior Manager, Data Engineering to ensure data engineering work follows defined patterns and standards
• Own the data platform roadmap from an architectural perspective, defining platform evolution strategy
• Contribute to enterprise architecture governance forums, representing data platform considerations in broader technology decisions
• Provide architectural input to vendor and tooling decisions, evaluating technology options and providing recommendations
• Maintain comprehensive documentation of design decisions, patterns, standards, and trade-offs
• Define non-functional platform architecture standards covering resilience, backup/restore, disaster recovery, observability, service levels, auditability and operational readiness
• Define platform security and privacy architecture in partnership with Cyber Security and Data Governance teams
• Establish architecture decision records, exception/waiver processes and design scorecards to govern deviations from platform standards
• Maintain platform adoption, performance, cost and standards-compliance metrics to guide roadmap priorities and architecture governance decisions

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in Databricks (Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, Spark, Databricks SQL) or equivalent Lakehouse platforms
• Strong understanding of cloud-native architecture principles, cost models, and practical experience with CI/CD pipelines and environment strategies
• Proven implementation of data security measures (encryption, RBAC, column/row-level security, data masking)
• Strong understanding of ingestion and pipeline architecture patterns for diverse source systems
• Experience defining architectural standards and patterns that engineering teams implement
• Experience working within a centralised architecture function that engages flexibly with delivery squads
• Ability to communicate architectural decisions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Experience defining non-functional requirements and architecture patterns for enterprise-grade resilience, observability, disaster recovery, data lifecycle management and operational readiness
• Experience using architecture decision records, design authorities, exception management and measurable standards adoption to embed architectural governance

Skills

Experience

Extensive experience designing and governing enterprise data platforms; proven track record establishing architectural authority and standards within complex, multi-team environments; experience transitioning data infrastructure from outsourced to in-house ownership; demonstrated expertise in implementing cloud-native data solutions at scale. Experience with SAP data landscapes (BW, Datasphere, S/4HANA data flows) is highly desirable.

Education

University degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or related field, or equivalent professional experience demonstrating equivalent expertise in data architecture and enterprise systems.

Workplace

Culture

Burberry fosters a creative and inclusive workplace culture that values diversity and sustainability. The company is committed to being a force for good, driving industry change and championing community engagement.

About Cerulean

Cerulean is the definitive career portal for the global luxury industry. We match exceptional professionals with exclusive opportunities at the world's most prestigious brands. From haute couture and fine watchmaking to prestige beauty, hospitality, and boutique retail, Cerulean centralises luxury employment to help you find the career for which you were destined.