Lead Data Architect (Grade M1)

Key Responsibilities

• Act as SFCs authority for Data Architecture, providing specialist expertise, thought leadership, and guidance on data design, modelling, and data architecture standards.
• Define, maintain, and evolve SFCs data architecture, ensuring alignment with organisational priorities, data strategy and future business needs.
• Lead the development and maintenance of enterprise, domain, conceptual, logical and physical data models, creating a shared understanding of data across SFC.
• Establish and maintain data architecture principles, standards, reference architectures and design patterns that support trusted, scalable, and sustainable use of data.
• Lead data architecture governance and design assurance, providing challenge, recommendations and architectural oversight for significant data initiatives and programmes.
• Provide expert advice to senior stakeholders, influencing decisions through evidence-based recommendations and helping teams understand architectural options, risks and trade-offs. 
• Build consensus across teams and programmes, ensuring data architecture standards and principles are consistently applied across platforms, solutions and services.
• Define architecture approaches that improve interoperability, integration, governance, and reuse of data, supporting more efficient and joined-up services across SFC.
• Identify and manage data architecture related risks, technical debt and opportunities, ensuring emerging issues are addressed and escalated appropriately.
• Promote data architecture capability and maturity across SFC by coaching, mentoring and supporting colleagues, fostering greater understanding and adoption of good architecture practices. 

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

• Significant experience defining, implementing and evolving data architectures that support organisational strategy, transformation, and business outcomes.
• Demonstrable expertise in conceptual, logical and physical data modelling, including the development of enterprise and domain level data models.
• Experience establishing architecture principles, standards, governance processes and design assurance that support consistent and effective decision making.
• Strong understanding of data management and governance practises, including metadata, lineage, reference, master data, stewardship, with the ability to embed these principals into data architecture design.
• Experience designing data architecture for modern cloud-based data platforms, data integration patterns, preferably with Microsoft Azure ecosystem and Microsoft Fabric.
• Experience aligning data architecture decisions with organisational strategy, ensuring data models, standards and approaches support current priorities and future transformation.
• Proven ability to influence decisions, build consensus, and secure adoption of standards across teams without direct reporting authority.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts, risks, options and recommendations clearly to technical and non-technical audiences, including senior stakeholders.
• Ability to provide technical leadership through expertise, coaching and collaboration, supporting adoption of good data practise.
• Demonstrable ability to analyse complex issues, evaluate options and make evidence-based recommendations in situations where risk, ambiguity or limited precedent exists. 

• Experience working within education, skills, public sector or other complex data environments involving data sharing, multiple stakeholders and evidence-based decision making.
• Experience with Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Factory, Databricks, PowerBI semantic models or equivalent technologies.
• Professional qualification or certification in Data Architecture, Enterprise Architecture, Data management, or Data Engineering (e.g. TOGAF, DAMA CDMP, MS Azure Solutions Architect, MS Fabric Data Engineer) 

Terms and Benefits

About
We are the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council, more commonly known as the Scottish Funding Council (SFC).We are Scotland’s tertiary education and research authority and our purpose is to sustain a world-leading system of tertiary education, research and innovation that enables students to flourish, changes lives for the better, and supports social, economic and environmental wellbeing and prosperity.We do this by investing around £2 billion of public money to deliver:Tertiary learning and teaching.Skills and apprenticeships.Student support and participation.Research, innovation and knowledge exchange.Data collection and dissemination.National quality assurance and enhancement processes.Capital and digital infrastructure for the sector.Strategic change, responsive provision and research priorities.As a non-departmental public body established by the Further and Higher Education (Scotland) Act 2005, we are directly accountable to Scottish Government Ministers and the Scottish Parliament. We work across many government portfolios and are sponsored by the Lifelong Learning Directorate.We hold colleges, universities and other funded bodies to account for their delivery of required outcomes. We are also the statistical authority for colleges, and work closely with the UK-wide Higher Education Statistical Authority (HESA), to provide data and statistics for government, decision-makers, and the wider public.We work in partnership with a wide range of partners and bodies, including those we fund, across all aspects of our remit.General information for applicants for SFC rolesYou must already be eligible to work in the UK to apply for these roles. SFC does not offer employment sponsorship for new employees.We are pleased to support applications from everyone regardless of age, disability, race and ethnicity, socio-economic background, gender, sexual orientation, sex, gender reassignment, marital or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, religion or belief, as well as those who have skills in Scottish Gaelic or British Sign Language, who have the right skills for the job.  We are proud to be a Disability Confident employer and actively encourage interviews through the scheme.  Further information about SFC is available on our website Scottish Funding Council home page (sfc.ac.uk).   Additional information about our recruitment process can be found at Recruitment Information and Tips | Scottish Funding Council Careers (sfc.ac.uk).