Principal Data Architect

Canada Life UK looks after the retirement, investment and protection needs of individuals, families and companies. We help to build better futures for our customers, our intermediaries and our employees by operating as a modern, agile and welcoming organisation.

Part of our parent company Great-West Lifeco, Canada Life UK has operated in the United Kingdom since 1903. We have hundreds of respected and supported employees committed to doing the right thing for our customers and colleagues.

Canada Life UK is transforming to create a more customer-focused business by providing our customers with expertise on financial and tax planning, offering home finance and annuities propositions, and providing collective fund solutions to third party customers.

About the Role

Are you a visionary with deep data and technology skills in cloud and modern data architectures? Do you have a strong business understanding, ideally in the financial services industry? Are you experienced in defining data strategies and leading architectural transformations that support customer-centricity, digital experience and data-driven decision-making whilst fostering agility, scalability, and compliance? If so, we want you to join our team.

As a Principal Data Architect, you will take an overarching view across the whole organization, understanding our goals and enabling the business to unlock and realise the potential of data and analytics within Canada Life UK. Reporting to the Head of Architecture and Strategy, you will collaborate with senior IT leaders, key business stakeholders, and architects to make aligned pragmatic, commercially driven decisions that satisfy business objectives. You will be accountable for the development and delivery of key data capabilities, data management and analytic platform roadmaps and strategies across the enterprise.

Key Responsibilities

• Define the strategy and deliver the vision for enterprise-wide data management, analytics and information delivery across the CLUK organisation working with senior business stakeholders and IT Leaders.
• Own the CLUK enterprise data model(s), enterprise data flows and metadata systems.
• Establish business glossaries, data dictionaries, taxonomies and data catalogues to provide a common language for business terms, metrics and allow end users to find, understand, trust, and collaborate on data in partnership with data business owners.
• Set data governance, quality, access, storage, reference data, master data, integration, interoperability, modelling and data security standards for CLUK.
• Facilitate data collection, curation, cohesion and conformity to provide a rich source of content for CLUK’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) endeavours.
• Facilitate best practices for interoperability, integration and data exchange to support frictionless flow of data and process across the enterprise.
• Drive and foster enterprise data assurance and governance to ensure technical and operational delivery teams are working to the requisite data standards. Fully participate in the CLUK ARB and other appropriate data governance bodies.
• Lead the definition of IT data strategies, blueprint and guardrails for solutions, creating and implementing data solutions that meet client, colleagues and compliance needs.
• Work with CLUK’s Principal Architects and Lead Architects to ensure that organisation’s solutions are designed in accordance with the appropriate data architecture and in line with CLUK’s business, data and technical strategies.
• Define, review, and maintain data architectures, ensuring compliance with development, security, or infrastructure standards.
• Ensure alignment of data solutions across the organization and understand data dependencies between projects and products.
• Provide oversight and advice to Architects, Data SMEs and Data Engineers who are undertaking the design of data capabilities, data and integration solutions, data models etc.
• Provide leadership within the IT and Change Division, championing IT processes, best practices, and standards for data architecture in an agile mode.
• Bring external knowledge and industry best practice to drive innovation and best practices across the data domain.
• Collaborate closely with data architects and other colleagues across Europe and Globally to share and drive data architecture best practice and benefits.

What We’re Looking For

• Extensive SME knowledge in data, data management and data technology applicable to business areas such as data platforms, financial systems, legal systems, HR systems, contact management systems, and policy administration systems.
• Strong experience in cloud data management, integration and data platform analytics and machine learning, especially with Azure.
• A strategic thinker, able to define and translate business needs in data strategy and elaborating roadmap and guardrails to assure quality of products and projects.
• Ability to translate data and technical concepts between software engineering, delivery management, and service management.
• Expertise in making and guiding effective decisions, resolving technical disputes, and turning business problems into technical designs.
• Understanding of the whole context, looking beyond immediate technical problems to identify wider implications.
• Capable of producing strategy for data and data technology that meets business needs and creating, refining, and challenging patterns, standards, policies, roadmaps, and vision statements.
• Knowledge and experience of shifting architecture and data architecture capability from project to product mindset leveraging agility.

Qualifications

• Educated to degree level or equivalent experience in IT.
• TOGAF or BCS Certification (desirable).

Benefits of working at Canada Life

We believe in recognising and rewarding our people, so we offer a competitive salary and benefits package that’s regularly reviewed. As a Canada Life UK colleague, you’ll receive a competitive salary and comprehensive reward package including a generous pension and bonus scheme, along with, income protection, private medical insurance and life assurance. We have a fantastic number of other benefits and support services as well as regular personal and professional development.

How we work at Canada Life

Our culture is unique and incredibly important to us. We care about doing the right thing for our people, customers and community and helping others to build better futures. Our blueprint behaviours shape and influence how we work, and are central to the relationships we have with others. Every day we are encouraged to be more curious, own the outcome, face into things together and find a way forward.

We want colleagues to have rewarding careers with us so we invest in the development of our people, technology and workplaces. That’s why we offer a range of training, flexible working and opportunities to grow and develop.

Diversity and inclusion

Building an inclusive workplace with a diverse workforce where everyone can feel they belong and achieve their potential regardless of gender, ethnicity or any other characteristic is a key commitment for us. We are proud of the progress we’re making in DEI, and we continue for it to be a significant focus.

“At Canada Life we believe in the power of great people from different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives coming together to build better futures. Emerging talent is crucial to our growth and creating an environment that continues to inspire us all.” Nick Harding, Chief People Officer, Canada Life UK

We appreciate that everyone has different work and life responsibilities. We’re happy to discuss flexible working arrangements, including part time, for any of our roles should this be a requirement for you.