Data Architect

We're excited to be partnering with a leading institution in the UAE that is building a digital-first, AI-enabled financial services organisation from the ground up. This is a unique opportunity to join at an early stage and help shape the technology, data, and AI foundations of a business with significant institutional backing and long-term ambition. If you're passionate about data architecture, AI-ready platforms, and creating enterprise-wide data strategies, we'd love to hear from you. We’re looking for an experienced Data Architect to help design the data foundation for a new, AI-native financial services platform being built from the ground up in Abu Dhabi. This is a rare greenfield architecture opportunity where data is being designed with AI as a primary consumer from day one. A key part of the role will be establishing a common semantic foundation across the organisation: defining what core business concepts mean and ensuring those definitions can be consistently understood and used by people, systems and AI. This is not an AI application development role. We are looking for someone who can architect the trusted, governed and explainable data foundation that AI applications and models depend on. What you'll be responsible for: • Define the enterprise data strategy and target-state architecture across complex financial services domains • Design and own enterprise ontologies, semantic models and canonical data models, FIBO. • Develop the semantic foundation supporting knowledge graphs, AI grounding and retrieval systems • Architect the AI data supply chain, including feature engineering pipelines, feature stores, vector stores and RAG-ready datasets • Establish end-to-end data lineage, from source systems through transformation to AI/model consumption • Design modern cloud data platforms incorporating streaming, event-driven ingestion, lakehouse architecture and governed serving layers • Define data products, data contracts, metadata architecture and interoperability standards • Design secure and governed data-sharing patterns across organisational boundaries • Ensure the architecture supports regulatory-grade traceability, explainability, data quality and governance • Take architecture from strategy through to real-world implementation What we're looking for: • Strong experience in enterprise data architecture within financial services • Experience delivering a major greenfield build or enterprise-scale data transformation • Demonstrable experience designing data platforms supporting production AI/ML workloads, rather than analytics alone • Hands-on experience with ontology, semantic architecture, canonical modelling or knowledge graphs • Strong understanding of enterprise data modelling and metadata architecture • Experience with modern cloud data platforms and streaming/event-driven architectures • Strong understanding of data lineage, data governance and model traceability • Experience working within complex, highly regulated environments • Ability to translate enterprise data strategy into architecture