Principal Architect - Data

The Role

As a pivotal member of our Architecture Leadership team, you will report directly to the Head of Corporate Architecture, leading architectural transformation initiatives across the SEEK APAC data landscape. You will be a trusted and esteemed Principal Architect, and collaborate with cross-functional teams including Architecture, Data Services, AI and Platforms Services (AIPS), Security, Risk, Engineering, Product, and Go-to-Market, to craft SEEK’s target state data architecture blueprint.

Your role will involve leveraging your expertise in data, reporting, analytics, and AI to drive informed decision-making and translate SEEK’s Data Services space's business ambitions into an architecture strategy with actionable roadmap initiatives. In addition to driving architecture conversations, you will assess solution designs and proactively identify and address risks within SEEK’s data landscape, including data privacy concerns. Functioning as a business-focused architect, you will play a pivotal role in shaping and maintaining SEEK’s data platform architecture, reference architectures, and roadmaps in alignment with our overarching strategy. Your thought leadership will be instrumental in developing solution architectures where necessary, advocating for a pragmatic, value-driven approach to architecture.

This position may entail aspects of management and mentoring, as you represent technology leadership within our evolving architecture-led organisation. Collaborating closely with business and product stakeholders, you will deeply understand SEEK’s objectives, driving collaboration across teams to define and prioritize outcomes and initiatives. Ensuring that our Architecture Strategy bolsters technology health within your purview remains a core responsibility.

The Team

At SEEK, our Architecture function is divided into two core areas: Online and Corporate. The Online architecture team focuses on crafting architecture strategies that empower SEEK to develop and operate our flagship product, facilitating the realisation of both current and future product ambitions with efficiency. The Corporate architecture team is dedicated to shaping architecture strategies that drive SEEK's business operations, ensuring efficiency and effectiveness while propelling SEEK towards its overarching goal of unification and scalable global expansion.

Within the Corporate domain, the Data Architecture team plays a pivotal role, holding accountability for crafting the architectural strategy that underpins SEEK's delivery of unified data products, seamless business intelligence solutions, high-performance data engineering capabilities, and cutting-edge AI and analytics solutions.

Primary Accountabilities

• Vision and Strategy: Contribute to the development of the Data Services vision and strategy, ensuring alignment with overarching organisational goals.
• Current State Architecture: Thoroughly document SEEK’s current state data architecture, extending beyond the Data Services environment to encompass the AI specialist team within AIPS, engineering domains, and corporate applications such as Salesforce and Workday.
• Requirements Assessments: Utilise data program requirements (e.g. the data privacy program) and the Data Services vision and strategy as primary inputs to identify architectural gaps and opportunities, providing valuable insights to inform program scopes.
• Future-State Architecture: Lead the development of a comprehensive future-state architecture, gaining stakeholder buy-in while addressing critical aspects such as strategic objectives.
• Data Architecture Strategy and Roadmap: Break down the target state architecture into manageable deliverable milestones and articulate them within a roadmap housed in SEEK’s architecture hub, LeanIX.
• Market Assessments: Design an effective approach for vendor solution selections, encompassing long-list development, assessment criteria and weighting, shortlist development, options analysis, and ultimately providing a well-reasoned recommendation.
• Cross-Program Collaboration: Collaborate closely with other architects to identify potential gaps and overlaps between programs in the Data Services space and other domains, ensuring adherence to common processes, frameworks, and templates while fostering synergy across initiatives.

Requirements

Proven track record in delivering, engineering, and/or architecting some of the following essential data capabilities:

• Data governance, metadata management, and data privacy
• Consent and preferences management
• Data analytics, reporting, and MI/BI
• Data engineering
• Data science and ML/AI solutions
• Data security
• DataOps
• Lakehouse platforms

Hands-on experience with the following technologies (or equivalents from other vendors):

• Databricks platform
• Data modelling (e.g., Ellie.ai)
• Metadata management & governance technology (e.g., Alation, Alex, Collibra, DataHub)
• Technical data catalogues (e.g., AWS Glue, Hive metastore, Databricks Unity Catalog)
• Data pipeline orchestration (e.g., Airflow)
• Parallel data processing (e.g., AWS EMR, Databricks, Spark)
• MPP database engines (e.g., Athena, Redshift)
• Cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS EC2, S3, CloudFormation)
• Messaging & data streaming (e.g., Kafka, MSK, Kinesis, SNS)
• BI/analytics (e.g., Tableau, PowerBI, Databricks)
• Cloud security (e.g., IAM, LakeFormation, AWS Macie, AWS GuardDuty)
• Data quality & observability (e.g., Great Expectations, Deequ, AWS DataBrew, Monte Carlo)
• Cloud operations (e.g., CI/CD tools like BuildKite, monitoring & alerting tools like Splunk, Datadog)
• Stream processing tools (e.g., Spark Streaming, Delta Live, Flink, Beam, Kinesis Analytics)

Proven success in architecting transformative data platform programs.

Strong verbal and written communication abilities, complemented by the capacity to effectively engage and influence senior stakeholders.

Demonstrated history of proactively exploring and leveraging the capabilities of emerging technologies.