Data Architect, Databricks - Contract

Data Architect You must have • At least 2 years of commercial Databricks experience (current) • Be able to work 2 days a week onsite in Leeds • Strong understanding of design and architecture of data systems with patterns like; Medallion Architecture, Data fabric, Data mesh • Databricks certification would be welcome but we prefer hands on experience over theoretical About Red Badger We’re a tech and product consultancy, building enterprise software products for blue chip companies, multinationals and PLC’s. The best thing about Red Badger is; of course; the team. We’ve been around for 15+ years now and we are over 120 strong. We are really proud of our people; we support and learn a lot from each other; we work really hard but have fun doing it. We are a diverse group made up of 22 different nationalities, speaking 17 different languages. Headquartered in London we also have offices in Leeds and Cape Town. The Role Red Badger is looking for a Databricks Architect to join our Data & AI practice in Leeds. This is a delivery-focused role: you'll work directly with clients and Red Badger consultants, from all cross functional disciplines, to design complex technical solutions as an output from discovery phase, and then lead a team of data engineers to build the solution through to production. You'll work closely with the Director, Data & AI, and partner on pre-sales and proposals to add technical credibility and deepen our client partnerships. You love solving complex problems, and customer value is your north star. You are comfortable consulting with technology stakeholders outside of your team. You are a technology polyglot, and an evangelist for agile ways of working. Day to day, you will spend roughly half of your time hands on, pairing with data engineers on the team, and helping them pick the right design to solve the problem. In the other half, you’ll be supporting the other functions (delivery, product, software engineering) and our clients with decisions impacted by the technical strategy of the project and providing support and line management to data engineers on your team. Key Responsibilities Discipline Expertise and Leadership • Technology breadth : Deep, production-grade experience across AWS &/or Azure native services, with expert-level Databricks and/or Snowflake and an Agile delivery mindset. • Storage & Lakehouse: RDS, DynamoDB, S3, SageMaker Lakehouse, • Processing & ETL: Glue, EMR, Athena, CDC/DMS, DataBrew, Kinesis, dbt • Data management & metadata: Lake Formation, Glue Data Catalog, SageMaker Catalog / DataZone • AI: Bedrock (including AgentCore) and SageMaker AI • Storage & lakehouse: SQL, PostgreSQL, Cosmos, Blob, Data Lake, OneLake, Fabric Warehouse • Processing & ETL: Fabric Data Factory, Data Factory CDC, Fabric/Synapse Spark, ADF, Synapse Pipelines, Fabric, dbt • Data management & metadata: Purview • AI: Foundry, (including Agent Service), ML • On AWS, you're fluent across the core services, for example: • On Azure, you’re fluent across the core services, for example: • Data Product mentality: You build Data Products where every pipeline and dataset is discoverable, addressable and secure by design. • Data capabilities : You know the full data lifecycle, from discovery, storage, pipelines, ETL and streaming to data quality, governance, metadata management and cataloguing, through to advanced analytics and decision-making. • AI: You understand how AI is built and deployed in modern data platforms (Databricks, Snowflake) and cloud-native services like Amazon Bedrock, with enough depth to guide teams and advise clients, spanning LLMs and SLMs, agentic automation, Human in the Loop and MLOps. • Data Architecture Design : You know when to use RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), S