Senior Data Architecture Tech Lead

Join us

At Vodafone, weu2019re not just shaping the future of connectivity for our customers u2013 weu2019re shaping the future for everyone who joins our team. When you work with us, youu2019re part of a global mission to connect people, solve complex challenges, and create a sustainable and more inclusive world. If you want to grow your career whilst finding the perfect balance between work and life, Vodafone offers the opportunities to help you belong and make a real impact.

Role purpose

To design a unified, scalable, and secure data blueprint in conjunction with the tech group to integrate scattered network and business data. This role ensures that all data projects align with the business vision while maintaining a unified standard across all departments to avoid data silos.

Role profile

Technology stack ownership and alignment with data group technology: Lead the evaluation and selection of all data tools and ensure group approval for these tools (e.g., choosing the data virtualization tools, choosing the cloud provider, or the data lake technology). Also responsible for reporting to the group architecture maturity index and initiating any project to meet it.

Enterprise data transformation: Assess current and planned architecture and identify gaps towards trustworthy data and work on high-level design for these projects to ensure engagement of business and governance u2013 during the project, the principal architect will be responsible for ensuring that objectives and KPIs are achieved.

Data infrastructure readiness for AI: Preparing the data foundation so that internal data scientists can safely use data in their models to learn. If any gaps are discovered, a roadmap should be put in place to close them.

Architectural enablement for "Intelligent Data Apps": The architect must ensure the data infrastructure perfectly supports intelligent data software products that add more analytical insights for business (inbound and outbound data flow) and future-proof visualization tools.

Business alignment, governance, and lifecycle management: The architect ensures the technology roadmap serves business demand and maintains the long-term health of the data ecosystem.

Responsibilities

Technology stack ownership and alignment with data group technology:

• Negotiate with group architecture on yearly plan and budget.
• Responsible for evaluating SOA and identifying gaps to be studied and budgeted for implementation.
• Cross-domain modeling alignment: Collaborate with group architecture to review data attributes across complex domains (e.g., network core, BSS/OSS, retail transactions), ensuring schemas are optimized for high-performance processing inside intelligent data apps.

Enterprise data transformation

• Assess current and planned architecture and identify gaps towards trustworthy data and work on these projects until they are transferred from a gap to a project with an initial study document including high-level design, KPIs, and budget u2013 during the project, act as principal architect responsible for low-level design and ensuring that objectives and KPIs are achieved.
• Introduce advanced data virtualization strategies (e.g., Trino, Denodo) to sit on top of all data sources, allowing real-time, low-latency querying without moving raw data unnecessarily.
• Data lakehouse evolution: Serve as the principal architect for migrating the companyu2019s legacy big data (Hadoop/On-Prem) estate to a modern, cloud/hybrid data lakehouse environment (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, Delta Lake). Design the multi-phase migration roadmap, focusing on decoupling compute/storage separation and concurrency standards.
• Data governance integration: Architect automated hooks within the lakehouse migration so that data metadata, schemas, and lineage are automatically captured by the governance framework at ingestion.
• DaaS evolution: Review and expand the existing DaaS (API) infrastructure. Document the blueprint for the underlying current/new architecture that exposes data assets via secure, high-speed APIs, allowing developers to query enterprise data.

Data infrastructure readiness for AI

• Prepare the data foundation so that internal data scientists and external enterprise AI clients can safely consume the telecom data core.
• Semantic layering for GenAI ("Chat with Data"): Architect the semantic data layer and vector/graph database integration guidelines. This allows LLM applications to securely map natural language queries directly to mature DaaS APIs, grounding the AI and preventing data hallucinations.
• Data architecture for autonomous agents: Design high-concurrency, immutable data snapshot patterns. This ensures that when multi-agent AI systems query network or commercial data simultaneously, they work from a consistent, synchronized state without causing database deadlocks or performance lags.
• AI data-sourcing and feature engineering standards: Establish standardized, reusable data-delivery interfaces for data scientists ensuring clean, governed telemetry is served with minimal latency.
• Next-gen visualization ("Chat with Data"): Explore, architect, and run proof of concepts (PoCs) for generative AI/LLM integration (e.g., retrieval-augmented generation / RAG architecture), enabling business managers to ask natural language questions directly to the data lakehouse.

Architectural enablement for "Intelligent Data Apps"

• Ensure the data infrastructure perfectly supports business-facing software products and future AI tools.
• Architecting for intelligent apps: Design the high-throughput, reusable data blueprints required to power complex internal software products (e.g., retail management system, roaming insights platforms). Ensure data flows seamlessly to support real-time calculations and predictive forecasting engines.
• Enterprise AI readiness assessment: Systematically audit the data estate to evaluate if the data is structurally ready for AI/ML. Define architectural prerequisitesu2014such as feature stores and low-latency data pipelinesu2014needed to support production-grade AI models in these intelligent data apps.
• Next-gen visualization ("Chat with Data"): Enable this concept for internally developed intelligent data apps by designing a semantic layer.

Business alignment, governance, and lifecycle management

• Translate business demand to tech strategy: Act as a high-level internal consultant to commercial, digital, and network business units. Translate complex commercial goals into structural data requirements to ensure technology investments directly unlock business value.
• Architecture review board (ARB) leadership: Act as a vital member of the data ARB, reviewing and approving technical designs submitted by various business units to prevent the creation of new data silos.
• Legacy decommissioning and technical debt management: Author the architectural "sunsetting" roadmaps for legacy telecom data silos to reduce corporate infrastructure costs and manage technical debt during major platform cutovers.
• Act as cross-functional orchestration and guardrails for data organization:
• Ensure the standard macro-ingestion and integration patterns (e.g., real-time event streaming standards vs. batch window architectures).
• Ensure data modeling is according to industry standard guidelines (aligning closely with TM Forum SID telecom models).
• Partner with governance to define architectural requirements for automated metadata cataloging, master data management (MDM) for entities like retail sales reps, and data lineage tracking.
• Ensure compliance mandates (GDPR, local telecom privacy laws) and zero-trust security architecture requirements into the macro designs, ensuring sensitive commissioning and network data is strictly protected.

Core competencies and qualifications

• Technical expertise: Strong understanding of modern data architectures (e.g., big data, data warehouse, AI systems, and real-time data streaming), tools, and programming languages.
• Leadership: Ability to inspire and align diverse teams, manage complex projects, and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
• Strategic thinking: Capable of balancing short-term deliverables with long-term vision and scalability.
• Communication skills: Clear articulation of technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Problem-solving: Proactive and solution-oriented, with the ability to tackle complex challenges under tight deadlines.
• Agile community experience: Experience working in Agile teams to ensure delivery of needed quality gates and proactive actions.
• Must have technical/professional qualifications:
• 10+ years of experience in IT and maintaining large-scale data solutions.
• Knowledge of different vendors' technology in telecommunications and IT industry.
• Customer focus and ability to interact with decision makers.

Not a perfect fit?

Worried that you donu2019t meet all the desired criteria exactly? At Vodafone we are passionate about empowering people and creating a workplace where everyone can thrive, whatever their personal or professional background. If youu2019re excited about this role but your experience doesnu2019t align exactly with every part of the job description, we encourage you to still apply as you may be the right candidate for this role or another opportunity.

Who we are

We are a leading international telco, serving millions of customers. At Vodafone, we believe that connectivity is a force for good. If we use it for the things that really matter, it can improve people's lives and the world around us. Through our technology we empower people, connecting everyone regardless of who they are or where they live and we protect the planet, whilst helping our customers do the same.

Belonging at Vodafone isn't a concept; it's lived, breathed, and cultivated through everything we do. You'll be part of a global and diverse community, with many different minds, abilities, backgrounds, and cultures. We're committed to increasing diversity, ensuring equal representation, and making Vodafone a place everyone feels safe, valued, and included.

If you require any reasonable adjustments or have an accessibility request as part of your recruitment journey, for example, extended time or breaks in between online assessments, please refer to the application adjustments guidance provided by Vodafone.

Together we can.